Casino Windsor, again

As mentioned, poker1eh and I had planned to go to Casino Windsor for a little winter excitement. Here's the trip report:

Tournament:

Well, my entire tournament was pretty easy to remember, even without a notebook - I think I played 4 hands outside the blinds the entire time. Tournament is 60 players, starting with 2000 in chips, blinds at 25/50, and blinds move up every 20 minutes.

Hand 1: Blinds still 25/50, and I think I'd had one round through the blinds already, so down to 1925-ish. Folded to me on the button with K2s. I raise, the BB calls. Flop comes low, raggy, and with a 2. BB checks, I bet 150, he folds. Wheeee. Up above 2K in chips.

Hand 2: Blinds at 50/100. A few EP limpers, and I limp behind with ATs in the hijack. The button raises to 300, loses the blinds, all original limpers call. Flop QJx two suited, giving me a flush draw, a gutshot to broadway and an overcard. We check it around to the button, who bets 500. Folded back around to me. And here is my crucial decision of the tourney. What did I do? Did I push all-in so I could see all 5 cards with my combo hand? Did I fold knowing stacks weren't deep enough to draw, even with implied odds?? No. Like a true donkey I called over 1/4 of my stack trying to hit on the next card. Next card blanked off, I checked, button bet 800, and I folded. Way to lose almost half of your stack in one donkey hand, moron. I wound up sitting next to this guy after a table change later and he claimed to have QQ, and I believe him. So, my push would have been insta-called, but who knows whether I would have hit.

Hand 3: Blinds at 100/200, and my stack is 650 after having been 950 for an entire blind revolution without a decent hand to push with and having passed through the blinds having them both stolen. An EP limper, and it is folded around to me OTB with KTo. I push all-in, lose both blinds and the limper calls. KTo vs. A7o. Which doesn't matter much when the flop comes KKx. I more than double up to 1600, and we go on break the next hand.

Hand 4: Blinds at 200/400, about the 4th hand after break and I pick up AQo UTG+1. I insta-push (of course), the same guy that I sucked out on about 5 hands previous calls my all-in as does the BB. AQo vs QQ vs K7o. Nobody improves, and I'm out in about 30th place.

$3/$6:
The (lack of) quality play simply astounds me. I saw better play at the $0.15/$0.30 beginner tables at Party. Of course, this frustrates me even more that I have left a loser at 4 out of the 5 sessions I've played there. I left down $22 on Wednesday. Not much happened to me of note, but I'll type a few hands anyways:

Picked up AA in EP. Raised, and got a few callers. Flop Axx, two diamonds. Checked to me, I bet, one caller. Turn blank, but a diamond. He checks, I bet, he folds. Whew.

Picked up AKs in MP. Raise a few limpers, flop Q98. Checked to me, I bet (questionable), all call. Checked to me on the turn, I check behind. River blanks off, and I fold to a bet.

Very next hand pick up QQ and raise a few limpers. Don't remember a ton of the action (amazingly), but the board is double-paired low by the river. Guy called me down with AK and MHIG.

A few hands the poker1eh played were interesting:

He limped behind a few limpers in MP. Flop J52r, and he check-raises the entire field. It is so obvious to me the only hands he can have is 55 or 22. Nothing else makes sense. He had 22, and took the pot down with a bet on the river on a JJ552 board.

Another limp by him (in the CO, if I recall) after a ton of limpers, flop 772, checked to him and he bets out. I was quite confused by this (WTF could he have), until he wound up showing 77 at showdown for the flopped quads. Ah, that makes sense. And RIGGED!

Full Tilt is Rigged & I Suck at Full Ring

Well, in the midst of the excitement over PokerAce and a shot at $2/$4 I evidently forgot why I was avoiding Full Tilt in the first place.

It is rigged beyond all belief. :-)

A few graphs, since I haven't had one in a blog post for a while.

The Full Tilt portion of my $2/$4 FR adventure:


For a real hoot, if you start at what turns out to be hand 104 (where I am up 4 BB), for the next 200 hands I win 3 pots of about 4 BB each and have 2 blind steals. That's it. In fact, for the last 106 hands, I don't win ANY pots except one single blind steal. Overall, down $196 in a bit over 300 hands for the rockin' loss rate you see in the graph above.

Just for kicks, my stats over those hands were:

VPIP: 15.6%
PFR: 10.7%
AF: 2.0
WtSD: 30.0%
W$@SD: 27.8%

So, nothing too out of the ordinary except I was getting to showdown slightly less than usual, but losing $ at showdown at an insane rate (my W$@SD tends to be in the 53-55% range usually).

OK, you say, but that's only about a 50 BB drop - those happen all the time. I'll even give you that one - being 50 BB down in 300 hands probably isn't even a statistical outlier at even the 10% level. Just one of those things, right?

Next exhibit: all the hands I've ever played at FT:


Yes, that last drop-off at the end is nearly 130 BB. Kinda makes my 50 BB slide at $2/$4 look puny, huh? Translated to dollar terms, that slide is $360.

OK, so off of the Full Tilt is Rigged portion of the post. How bad do I suck at FR lately?


Yup, a 130 BB slide at FR there at the end.

This in contrast to my 6-max results:


So why do I try to play FR? Why do I keep playing at FT? Maybe I'm just a moron.

(in the interest of full disclosure, since I wrote this post, I'm up 30-ish BB = $85-ish from this bottom, although only about 5 BB of this is at $2/$4. Yay me.)

Long Time, No Write

Well, I've been massively busy at both home and work, so not much time to keep up on the ol' blog. Hopefully this will fix that for a bit.

A few weeks ago I purchased PokerAce - an alternative Heads-Up display for PokerTracker stats. It is easily worth the $25, if only for the below features:

• It flashes mucked cards at showdown, freeing you from having to go into the instant hand history to look for them.
• It has a selection of 30+ statistics you can overlay on any player, or have available via a quick click on the player's name. You can even color code each individual statistic based on the value of that stat.
  
• It auto-detects all your tables and immediately overlays the statistics on them, before you even sit down. This allows for immediate assessment of whether the seat you are being offered is worthwhile to even sit down at.

This becomes especially useful for sites that can be datamined.

So, between this purchase and me earning a sufficient amount at $1/$2 (6-max, anyways), I decided to take the next step in the bankroll pyramid - to take a 40 BB shot at $2/$4. I decided to take a shot at $2/$4 full ring since I would imagine the variance would be less there, even though I seem to have had more success playing 6-max. I also decided to go back to Full Tilt for two reasons:

• I would be playing under a bonus (albeit very slowly clearing)
• I could datamine the heck out of the tables before stepping in

My typical session now goes like the following:

1. Open up Full Tilt
   
2. Open up all the $2/$4 FR tables, then the $1/$2 FR tables, and as many of the $1/$2 6-max tables as I can before reaching the 16 table limit.
   
3. Let PT / PokerAce accumulate data for about 10 minutes while I go take a shower or something
   
4. Come back, look at the VPIP/PFR/etc. for all the tables in PokerAce and see if there are any immediately apparent soft spots, regardless of the level.
   
5. Get on the waiting lists for those tables, and when they come open see if the seat I am being offered is decent. If not, decline the seat but get immediately back on the waiting list.

What is a soft spot? Well, for me any FR table with a VPIP above 35 and a PFR in the single digits is a no-brainer. In the event I can't find anything perfect, I'd rather have a 29/5 table than a 40/25 table - at full ring I like to go for the low PFR tables, as they allow me to play way more hands, especially in late position. For a 6-max table finding a table with PFR in the single digits is a pipe dream, but if I can find one with something like 39/13, I'm happy.

So, how is that working for me?

Well, I have managed to rack up a total of 422 hands of $2/$4 full ring, and am down a total of $119.50 for a nice -7.08 BB/100 rate. The funny thing is that this really doesn't bother me, as I know I'm playing good poker - I bet if I went back and reviewed hands, I'd say that there are maybe 5 BB worth of mistakes in that 30 BB loss. Not that 5 BB of mistakes in that amount of hands is something to be proud of, but that the vast majority of my loss is just the usual short-term variance of having big draws not come in, having your AA and KK cracked, and making expensive second-best hands. Or maybe I was right all along that Full Tilt must be rigged. :-)

If anything, I've found the $2/$4 FR tables to be softer than their $1/$2 counterparts, which leaves me with a dilemma - do I just ride out this 40 BB challenge and then drop back to $1/$2, or do I believe what I am seeing about the game's softness and stick with it beyond the 40 BB challenge? I haven't made up my mind yet. I do know that it still bugs me that I've dropped back in the red for $1/$2 full ring and will (at the very least) drop back long enough to rectify that situation. Of course, the skeptics among you will point out that if I can't beat $1/$2 full ring, I have no business stepping in a $2/$4 FR game. Shut up, you.

I just find it bizarre that I am up well over 100 BB at $1/$2 6-max and down something like 20 BB at $1/$2 full ring over about the same number of hands (5000-ish). Either:

• this is just variance
• I really rock at 6-max
• I really suck at FR
• there are far more fish at 6-max

or some combination of any of the above. Maybe $2/$4 6-max is my next step, but I doubt it.

In live poker news, poker1eh and I are going to head off to Casino Windsor the Wednesday after Christmas for a little $3/$6 limit and a $50+$5 No-Limit tournament. Should be interesting, since I don't think I've played a single hand of NL in well over 6 months. Maybe this weekend I'll buy into a small STT or two at FT just to refresh myself as to how that game goes, and maybe review a little HoH. The tournament pays top 5 at $1350 / $750 / $450 / $300 / $150. Hopefully I won't finish 6th again. :-)

Swearing Monkey-Tilt

Well, I did it. I am ashamed to say that Full Tilt caused me to hit the Swearing Monkey Tilt stage, and I have Quadman to prove it (sorry, man - you did NOT deserve to be on the other end of that chat session, even if it wasn't directed at you).

I had hit $100 of bonus cleared at Full Tilt and had already sworn that I was not going to play another hand there. As it turns out, in order to get to that point I was already down another 50 BB from where I left off in the last blog update.

But then I had an early child feeding Sunday night and (with Monday being a holiday for me) I decided to log in and see what was happening. I located one of the biggest $1/$2 fish there is (53%/0%/0.3) and grabbed a seat at his table to his immediate right. Lo and behold, Quadman is sitting to the fish's left! Small world. :-)

In the span of about 60 hands I played the following 4 monstrosities, 3 of them against the fishie:

• AT on a AJ3 flop. Fishie had J3
• 66 which made middle set on the flop. Fishie had no pair, no draw, but hit runner-runner for a str8. (This started the tilt)
• QJo, flop QJ6, turn blank, river 6. Guy flips over T6.
• 45s in the BB, 5 ways for 2 bets preflop. Flop 863r, giving me an open-ender. Turn was a 2, giving me the nuts. Me and the fishie capped the turn. River was a 3. I bet/called the raise and he flipped over 88 for the rivered boat. (This pushed me into full-blown monkey-tilt, and the aforementioned chat session with Quadman)

Luckily I logged off 1-2 button revolutions after that last hand (although one could argue I should have logged off immediately, or better yet even sooner - once I started to realize the onset of tilt). Another 30 BB down the drain in an incredibly short session.

I am not usually one of the players to shout "rigged" but I am at a loss of how "swingy" Full Tilt can be - every session seems to be either up 40-50 BB or down 50-60 BB depending on which side of the rigged-o-meter you happened to be that day. It is really hampering my ability to enjoy the game. And it also points out that I have a LONG way to go towards getting tilt out of my game.

I have signed up for Stars and made my initial deposit, so even if I decide to "get just a few hands in" I at least have another place to do it. Of course, there is no guarantee that Stars is any better (or that my perception of the game in general is any better) but will be at least a fresh start. Combine that with a few nights off to clear my head, and hopefully I'll get back on the right track.

Halloween Curse, The Aftermath

Well, how have I been doing since the Halloween Curse? The graph below tells an interesting story:


You can see the -$120 slide pretty easily - I actually slid some more a few days after that to bottom out at about -$156 in 480-ish hands.

I then spent about the next 800 hands getting it all back (and then some!), including that amazing vertical stretch in the middle of the graph where I made $61 profit in 4 consecutive hands.

Then I spent another 400 hands or so blowing off about $115.

Then I spent 150 hands making most of that back.

Sum total? 1826 hands, down exactly 5 cents over that stretch. Doesn't seem worth the stress. :-)

Interestingly enough, a lot of the upswings during that stretch were full-ring and much of the downswing was 6-max, to the extent that I am now doing better (both dollar-wise and winrate) at $1/$2 full-ring ($122, 2.34 BB/100) than I am at $1/$2 6-max ($71, 1.23 BB/100). Weird game.

Just to keep things in perspective, though, here's what it looks like when viewed in perspective of all my hands (y-axis in BB instead of $ since there is now quite a bit of difference between the lowest level I've played and the highest level I've played)


Barely even a blip.

I think I'm going to sign up for Poker Stars this weekend - everything I've heard points to the fact that the fish / TAG ratio is far better there. I also checked out bonuswhores.com tonight, and there are some sweet bonuses out there for U.S players on some Prima sites. Maybe the bonus chasing portion of my poker "career" isn't over quite yet.....

Halloween Curse?

Well, I decided (as usual) to get some poker in before work this morning. Perhaps it was a Halloween curse of some sort, but I had one of the worst sessions I have had in quite some time.

In 171 hands, I lost $119.25. That is over half my $1/$2 6-max profit gone in less than 40 minutes. Here is what that looks like:



I feel like I should have stood up at some point, but I don't know when. It was just the wrong end of big hand vs. big hand, over and over again. Two hands that stand out in my mind:

• KQ on a AKK flop, lost to AA.
• TT flopped top set, lost to AA when he spiked an A on river - that was a $46.50 pot.

and every pot I won was a small pot of the variety:

• KQo, Flop AJTr, take it down with a single bet vs. 3 opponents on the flop.

I'll have to admit that I had been running well enough that in my mind I had the impression that this 6-max stuff was a breeze. I had already figured earning the $100 so I could take a shot at $2/$4 was going to be a no-brainer. Maybe this is a good grounding to remind me that it truly isn't as easy as I had led myself to believe. I just wish the 60 BB hit had been at 50/1. :-)

On the positive side (because I need to look for those positives after a session like that):

• I am still running at almost 3 BB/100 at $1/$2 6-max even after this horrid session.
• I don't think I went on tilt. I'll review my play to see if this is true, but I certainly didn't hit the swearing-monkey-tilt stage.
• I don't feel totally demoralized like the last time I had a 50+ BB loss. Disappointed, yes. But not rolling it over and over in my mind and obsessing about it like last time.
• I am still up money at every site, every level ($0.39 at $1/$2 FR!!!!!! WOOO HOOOOOO!!!!), and still up a chunk of change for October (amazing what you can do with a Poker Tracker export and an Excel Pivot Table in 5 minutes):

Admittedly, these tables looked MUCH better before this morning's bad run (my September/October profit was almost $350, and my 6-max profit was also well over $300), but I think I can still take solace in my results over time so far. I'll hope for better luck tomorrow, I suppose.....

$0.39

Well, I finally did it. I am finally out of the red at $1/$2 full ring. 2300 hands, $0.39 profit for the rockin' winrate of 0.01 BB/100. Go me.

I had an interesting night of it last night - sat to the immediate left of my brother who himself was to the immediate left of one of the biggest fish I've seen at $1/$2 FR - a 57/0/0.32 guy who called down to the river with anything. Yum. I actually was down at that table for quite a while (as was Quadman) but I hit a few hands at the end and wound up $10.

At the other table I had an interesting time of it - I was totally card dead (I played only 4 hands out of my first 50, luckily winning them all big, so was up about $35) so I'm sure I looked like the biggest rock on the planet. Then I played the next 6 consecutive hands:

• 98o in the SB (lost in a BvB when my flush lost to his higher flush): -$7.00
  
• KQs OTB (lost when the fish played K2s and hit his 2): -$5.00
  
• 99 in the CO (got out on the turn in a boat-vs-boat confrontation): -$5.00
  
• A6s in the hijack (open raised and got 3-bet by the BB. Whiffed and folded on the flop): -$3.00
  
• AQo in MP (raised an EP limper, took it down unimproved vs AT at the river): +$6.00
  
• KJs in EP (limpfest, raggy flop checked around, J hits on the turn and I raise a bet into me and take it down right there): +$5.75

Then a few hands later lost a bunch on a AKo vs 99 on a A92-K-6 board. So summary of that one is I caught a huge rush of cards in about one button revolution and got to lose about $20 on them. :-(

But all in all it was a good table, and I left that table up $24.50 - just enough (evidently) to earn enough to bring my lifetime earn positive.

I think I'm going to (slightly) modify my criteria for taking a 40 BB shot at $2/$4 - instead of earning another 60 BB at $1/$2 FR exclusively, I'll take a shot when I hit $700 in profit, regardless of what I earned it at. This will be another $100-ish abive wher I am now, and I'll mix it up with both 6-max and FR games to try and earn it. Wish me luck.

Update

Yes, I am getting really, really lazy about naming my updates.......

Bad news: I'm on a 80 BB downswing at $0.50/$1.00 6-max. It is the usual low limit beats (getting rivered) as well as a large amount of big hand vs. slightly better hands against maniacs who will bet and raise with anything, so I wouldn't believe them. Hard to watch someone win against them with A-high at the river when you can't even get your overpairs to hold up against them. I checked my stats just to make sure I wasn't calling down more often with losing hands, etc. but it appears I am going to showdown about 20% less than I have been and also losing the showdowns about 20% more frequently than before. So, just running bad. No biggie.

Good news 1: I was already running well enough at $0.50/$1 6-max that an 80 BB hit still leaves me at almost 2.5 BB/100 at that level since I started.

Good news 2: At the same time as my downswing, I am on a 80 BB upswing at $1/$2 6-max.

I am about 6,000 hands into my 6-max experience and really like it - as you can see from the bankroll update to the right, I've already outstripped what I made in my first 30K hands of full ring in only 6K hands of 6-max. To be fair, I'm also playing at a higher limit now, but in terms of big bets, I am up 317 BB at full ring and 200 BB at 6-max.

The $0.50/$1.00 6-max games are super soft, especially during peak times. It is not unheard of to have 3 of my 5 opponents with 45%+ VPIP. Many of them are more aggressive than their full-ring cousins so it takes a bit more to beat them. The $1/$2 tables are a bit tighter (only 1-2 fish per table) and a lot more aggressive. You really have to pick your spots carefully - I am very careful with table and seat selection

In theory, I have now completed the first stage of my bankroll pyramid from a previous post, being up 80 BB at $1/$2. That should mean that my next stop is to take $160 and take a shot at $2/$4. In actuality, what I think Iwill do is to play $1/$2 full ring until I earn the $160 to step up. Why??????? Well, for a totally trivial reason - $1/$2 full ring is the only level where I am an overall loser (down about 20 BB). That bugs me every time I start PokerTracker . :-) So, I'll play until I'm up 60 BB at that level, then take my shot. Don't try to figure me out......

$5,000 and beyond

Due to a good run on the blackjack tables as I finish up playing before the online ban goes into place, I have moved above the $5,000 mark. That's a $700 improvement in just two weeks since my last update, and that is with only about 6 hours of actual gameplay. Nice earn rate, for sure!

I'm still astonished that I am in this position - when I started this journey with absolutely $0 of my own money a tad bit over 8 months ago, there would be NO WAY I would have imagined that I would top the $5,000 mark by this point. Admittedly, over half of this money came from a source (blackjack) that hadn't even crossed my mind at the beginning, but this still doesn't dampen my amazement. In theory, I am bankrolled to play $5/$10 and nearly bankrolled to play $10/$20. Yikes!

Now that the ban will go into place, I'm sure this incredible rate of earn will go down significantly, as I will be "restricted" to just playing poker, unless some of the online casinos pull a surprise and either stay open or re-open on advice from their lawyers.

Assuming this will not happen, I'm going to do a summary of my blackjack play. The below graph and chart should say it all.

A few notes:

• The graph and chart do not include the $300 GamesGifts affiliate bonus, but my bankroll update (obviously) does - thus the discrepancy in values.
  
• I was running insanely hot over this stretch - over 50% above my expected earn across all casinos.
  
• I cannot believe I have put over $43,000 in action on the tables, but like I said before, I guess betting every 5 or 6 seconds adds up very quickly. On casinos with the fastest software, I was getting in 800 hands per hour.
  
• Party Casino is OMFG RIGGED!!!!!! :-)
  

I'm off to Full Tilt next (likely) as they are one of the online poker rooms that will stay open. It seems there are more of them than I would have thought which is perhaps a ray of hope that some of the other rooms will see the light as well.

The end? Maybe not.....

It looks like my last post may have been a bit premature, although the situation is still grim. Many sites have said they will stay open past the time of signing, including "name" sites like Full Tilt:

Official statements from various poker sites

Cardplayer.com's thoughts:

What's NOT Included in Anti-Gaming Legislation including the following phrase:

Do not panic. First and foremost, this bill does not criminalize playing poker. In fact, the bill does not speak to the poker player at all.

Also nice to know that Party will pro-rate the amount of my bonus that I do not clear before they shut down U.S. players:

2+2 post from a from Party representative

That's about it. More positive than the last one, but still a bummer...

The End

Well, it appears to have happened. Late night on Friday, September 29, the U.S. Government passed a bill making it illegal for U.S.citizens to gamble on the Internet. Well, actually the bill focused on the methods by which online accounts are funded, but the net effect of the bill is to ban online gambling. The bill has not been signed into law by the President yet, but there is no reason to think that he will not, as the bill was attached to a port security bill that has very little chance of being vetoed. This pretty much sounds the death-knell for the online gambling industry, estimated at 6 billion dollars per year in the U.S.

In theory, there is a gap of time (270 days) during which the banks and other financial providers have to become compliant with the law. In actuality, the casinos (especially the publicly traded ones) have jumped this gun and started banning U.S. players outright. And the ones that have started the banning are not the small-fry casinos either - among those that have banned (that I know of as of 7:00 Monday morning!) are Partygaming, 888.com, William Hill, and Intercasino. I have not kept up on the news, as I am disconnected from the network as I write this, but would not be surprised to see that all of my casino / poker options have been closed to me by the time I get home today. I think my only possible action is to try to play out the end of my Party bonus ($100, 5x, and I'm about 30% through it) before the President's pen actually signs it into law.

There is some speculation that the reasoning behind this bill is to "prove" that you cannot ban something as large as this - that it will fail much like Prohibition in the 1920s, and once it has deemed to have failed, to regulate and tax it. I think this is VERY optimistic thinking - I personally do think that the ban will fail much like prohibition, but don't know that the situation will shake out in exactly that way. Regardless, it would take many years to get to that point.

The reasoning for the bill is to protect us from the evils of gambling. Senator Bill Frist had this to say

"Gambling is a serious addiction that undermines the family, dashes dreams and frays the fabric of society," Dr Frist said. "The bottom line is simple: internet gambling is illegal. Although we can't monitor every online gambler or regulate offshore gambling, we can police the financial institutions that disregard our laws."

This is, to be quite frank, pure bullshit. If that were the case, there would not be exceptions in the bill for online betting on horses, lotteries, and fantasy football. The bill is pure hypocrisy - a combination of election year politics and the inability to tax the stream of money that is produced.

If you haven't guessed, I am highly offended that the government can control what I do with my own disposable income and in my own free time.

Land of the free indeed.

I will likely see what the damage is over this next week, tidy up for a last bankroll update, and check out. I hate to complain, as I am over $4,000 richer than whan I started, but am totally disgusted at my government right now.

More random stuff

Yes, it is time for yet another post of stuff that is too-small-for-a-post-of-its-own.

As you can see by the right column, my blackjack earnings from the last two months of sporadic play are approaching my poker winnings from the last 7 months of steady play. Craziness. I'm running at about $500 more than my "expected" profit to this point, but I'm not going to complain. Even more craziness - I've put over $35,000 in action to get that profit. It sure doesn't feel like it, but I suppose betting $1-$3 every 8 seconds or so adds up quickly. :-) On the positive side, I'd estimate I've only spent 40-50 hours overall at this, so am earning somewhere in excess of $40-50/hr doing it. Certainly an hourly rate I can't approach playing $0.50/$1.00 limit hold'em, even with bonuses......

I have decided to take a challenge (inspired by a 2+2 post) to see if I am ready to move up a level to $1/$2 (or higher). It lays out like this:

1) Pick the level you will start out at, and carve 80 BB out of your bankroll to dedicate to it.

$160, and start at $1/$2

2) Double this bankroll to 160 BB

$320

3) Take half of this bankroll to the new level

take $160 profit and go to $2/$4

4) Double this bankroll to 80 BB

$320

5) Take half of this bankroll to the new level

take $160 profit and go to $3/$6

6) Double this bankroll

$320

7) Take 15 BB for the next level and play for 3 hours or until it is gone, going up whenever you have 15 BB for the next level.

take $170 profit, and take the remaining $150 and take a shot at $5/$10.

Even if you lose the last $170, you've made a profit of $490 taking the challenge. And if you bust out of any level greater than the first, you've assured yourself some profit. I will also probably attempt this while under a 5x bonus, to further limit the risk.

I'm going to play a single table of $1/$2 full ring to see if I can start this challenge out on the right foot.

As it turns out, I started it just today, and have already had KK UTG run into 44 from a 52%/0% fish who cold called me UTG+1 on (of course) a J94 flop that took a whack out of my intial stack. Also had AA cracked by the all powerful 75o. Hopefully things look up - I'm down over $30 in 60 hands! :-)

3) I played $3/$6 live at Casino Windsor again. The table was unbelievably fishy (in fact, poker1eh stayed LONG after I left to extract some of the value there) but couldn't hit a flop all night and finished down about 7 BB. No big deal. Most of it wound up in poker1eh's pocket as he won two big pots with his AK vs my KK on an Axx flop, and his KQs vs my AKs on a Q-high board. That last hand actually had 5 people in for 3 bets apiece preflop ($45 preflop!!!!), and so was a painful one to lose.

4) Will Hill closed up shop to U.S. players earlier this week. That was painful - that was one of the few monthlies left. I never did get to do their monthly, but I did hit up their initial bonus pretty well - deposited 50 GBP and cashed out for 243 GBP, about a $366 profit. Schweet. I really hope that this casino closure does not foretell the "beginning of the end" for us Stateside players.

Well, that's it. Back to the tables......

6-max

Yes, after hearing about how soft the shorthanded games are and with some prodding from my "coach" I finally decided to stick my pinky toe in the scary waters of 6-max. I had never tried it before due to the fact that my blind defense has always been a weak part of my game, and I thought 6-max was chock full of aggressive players always trying to steal your blinds and making it 3 bets before the flop with air.

Boy was I wrong.

Or, rather, yes there are those people but they are far outnumbered by the fish. And by fish I mean someone like 60% VPIP, 4% PFR, 0.30 AF. When you can count on 2 or 3 of those people at your table (half the players!) you can see why the games might be considered soft. With a bit of good table selection and the diligence to stand up from a table when it is readily apparent I am in the wrong seat (maniac players to my left) I have managed to clip right along at a rate of nearly 5 BB/100 for the 2500 hands I have played. I realize this is very, very short term, but is certainly a good indication of the softness of the games. Chart:


You certainly can't bring your normal full-ring game to the 6-max table, or you will get eaten alive by the blinds. The funny thing about 6-max (to me) is so far I see people either playing way too tight (VPIP 8%) or way too loose (VPIP 50%+ including some in the 80-90% range!) with very few people "in the middle" where the sweet spot is. How do my playing statistics compare? At comparable money levels:

Full ring: 15.8% VPIP, 7.6% PFR, 1.99 AF
6-max: 22.3% VPIP, 13.1% PFR, 2.49 AF

So, as you would expect, more opened up pre-flop and more aggressive post-flop. Amazing that I am raising almost as many hands at 6-max as I am playing in full ring.

I have now split up my bankroll update between full ring and 6-max to separate the two - see the right column for the results.

Believe it or not, I may actually go after a BJ bonus next, even with as much fun as I'm having with 6-max. Don't try to figure me out......

Risk of Ruin, again

This should be a quick post. I actually had my first Blackjack bonus where I finished in the red - I cleared the $100 Party August reload at PartyCasino and cashed out $11 poorer than I started.

This is not that big a deal, but I only bring it up to clarify one of my points in a previous post. As it turns out, I was down more than $200 at one point clearing this bonus and thus if it was the "standard" bonus I have been talking about in previous posts, I would have gone bust. This actually serves to illustrate why I said before my model underestimates the chance of going bust - my model doesn't take into account that you could have gone bust "on your way" to a non-bust result, as what happened here.

If we use the numbers on wizardofodds.com done from actual simulations, you come up with different numbers:

$1 betting - My RoR: 0.1%, WoO RoR: 0.1% (this is a good check - for very small bets the model should match)
$2 betting - My RoR: 1.0%, WoO RoR: 2%
$3 betting - My RoR: 3.0%, WoO RoR: 5%
$4 betting - My RoR: 5.1%, WoO RoR: 10%
$5 betting - My RoR: 7.2%, WoO RoR: 14%
$10 betting - My RoR: 15.1%, WoO RoR: 30%
$25 betting - My RoR: 25.7%, WoO RoR: 50%

For the larger bets, the RoR is about double my model which (coincidentally) was about that I was thinking it would be. Nice to know my math intuition hasn't gotten that rusty. If I can find the actual formula to produce these numbers, I may update it in my spreadsheet, as I use that spreadsheet to choose how much I'm going to bet for a particular bonus.

That is all - this and a bankroll update on the right. Told you it would be short.......

Taxes

They say the only two sure things in life are death and taxes. I don't want to think about the former, so I'll talk about the latter. Specifically, how to treat all this money that has been flowing in from poker and blackjack from a tax perspective?

This is the point where poker1eh starts laughing as he has none of these problems - as a Canadian citizen, all gambling winnings are tax free. Jerk - stop laughing. Now. I mean it.

Anyway, if it wasn't apparent by the fact I'm writing this article in the first place, I will be paying taxes on all my winnings. This even includes the $10 and $20 gift certificates from GamesGifts, etc. Everything on the up-and-up. So how is this done?

First of all, let's define how the IRS taxes gambling. The core concept is that the IRS treats each session as a taxable event and treats each of them differently. From publication 529:

You must report the full amount of your gambling winnings for the year on Form 1040, line 21. You deduct your gambling losses for the year on Schedule A (Form 1040), line 27. You cannot deduct gambling losses that are more than your winnings.

You cannot reduce your gambling winnings by your gambling losses and report the difference. You must report the full amount of your winnings as income and claim your losses (up to the amount ofwinnings) as an itemized deduction. Therefore, your records should show your winnings separately from your losses.

This (already) has a few important implications:

• You need to keep records on a session-by-session basis
• If you do not itemize your deductions on Schedule A (e.g. you take the standard deduction) the you cannot deduct your losing sessions, and will pay taxes only on your wins.
• If you have more losses than wins, you cannot offset any "regular" income from your gambling losses - you can only deduct losses to the extent of your wins.

In terms of the records needed for the first item above, there is more guidance in the same publication:

Diary of winnings and losses. You must keep an accurate diary or similar record of your losses and winnings. Your diary should contain at least the following information:

1. The date and type of your specific wager or wagering activity.
2. The name and address or location of the gambling establishment.
3. The names of other persons present with you at the gambling establishment.
4. The amount(s) you won or lost.

The four pieces of information above define a "session". However these were designed for brick and mortar type games - the concept of a "session" is rather murky online where I can multitable. For example, if I sit down one evening, have anywhere between one and four tables of poker open at any one time over the course of the night, and play $0.50/$1 tables as well as $1/$2 tables, leave some "bad" tables and join others, how do I measure how many sessions have I played when I stop for the night? Is each table its own session? Is each limit its own session? Is the entire night a session? Unfortunately, there have been no court cases or IRS Revenue Rulings on this point.

Let's look at how each of these scenarios would look from an export I did from my Poker Tracker database in mid-July, when my total net wins were $242.37

1. If each table where I got dealt at least one hand was its own session, I have a total of 395 sessions
• 197 winning sessions totaling $1,426.23
• 198 losing sessions totaling $1,183.86
2. If each limit (per night) was its own session, I have a total of 117 sessions
   • 58 winning sessions totaling $952.01
   • 59 losing sessions totaling $709.64
3. If each night was its own session, I have a total of 97 sessions
• 48 winning sessions totaling $893.52
• 49 losing sessions totaling $651.15

And, for the hell of it, even though we know it isn't correct:

1. If each week was its own session, I have a total of 23 sessions
• 16 winning sessions totaling $539.52
• 7 losing sessions totaling $297.15
2. If each month was its own session, I have a total of 6 sessions
   • 5 winning sessions totaling $261.22
   • 1 losing session totaling $18.85

Note that each one of these results in me having a net win of $242.37, as required.

This is an interesting example of "the long run" in that things that appear random on a very short timescale actually are not when viewed over enough samples to make a difference. In other words, if I told you I had played a game and had won 197 times and lost 198 times, you'd likely think that I must not be very good at the game, or at most about average. But if I told you I had played a game over a series of months and that I'd had five winning months and one losing month, you'd draw a different conclusion. This is a phenomena not limited to poker - for example, budgeting falls into this category. I have no earthly idea how much I'll spend on groceries today or even this week, but over the span of a month or year I can take a pretty good guess. Budgeting (or specifically, tracking against budget) on too short a timeframe is a useless exercise, but much more predictable and useful when viewed over a longer term.

OK, OK, but back to taxes - which one of these is the correct method for filing taxes?

The way these rules have been interpreted in the online realm is that a player can net his results in two (or more) different games/tables if they were the same game played at the same limit, continuously, as part of the same session. This implies that in hypothetical example above, no matter how much table hopping I do and no matter how long I do it, I actually have 2 sessions - a session of $0.50/$1.00 and a session of $1/2. In addition, for my actual play it means that for my particular situation I take the second example above: 58 winning sessions of $952.01 and 59 losing sessions of $709.64

Likewise, every single day of blackjack would need to be recorded with what your balance was at the beginning of the session and the end. Since there is (as far as I know) no PT equivalent to automatically track these items, I have been doing this by hand in an Excel spreadsheet.

OK, that was a pain. Why do I even care that I have to declare more income if I'm only going to subtract it as a deduction later? Sure, the IRS makes me jump through hoops, but this method shouldn't hurt me, right? Not so fast.....

• This method increases your AGI and if you are in a high enough income bracket, you start to lose the ability to claim your full exemptions, claim your full deductions, contribute to Roth IRAs, etc. It may also subject you to the AMT. All bad stuff, although for the amount I'm throwing around, not that big a deal. But you can see that adding $950-ish to my AGI is a lot different than just adding my net win of $240-ish. But in general, unless your AGI passes one of these levels this method does not result in increased taxes - I'll pay the equivalent taxes on my $240-ish, regardless of how it lays out on the tax forms.


• At present, nine states (including Michigan!) do NOT allow the full deduction of gambling losses when calculating state taxes. Yes, this means that I am taxed on the $950+ of winning sessions, but I cannot deduct my $700+ in losses (actually Michigan law seems to be kind of screwy in that I can actually deduct my first $300 of losses, but no more). At the Michigan tax rate of 4%, this increases my tax bill by $16 over what I would have paid if I could have deducted all the losses. That doesn't sound like much, but it is actually almost 7% of my actual earn! In fact, assuming this ratio holds for my entire year (that my winning sessions will be about 4x my net profit and my losing sessions will be about 3x), my effective state tax rate could be up to 16% on my winnings! Ouch, ouch, OUCH.

One last things before wrapping up this long article. How are bonuses / rakeback / other prizes treated from a tax perspective? I haven't looked this up in detail, but I would be very surprised if they couldn't just be treated as just another winning session. I will be going on this assumption until my research tells me otherwise.

Yes, and I can still hear you laughing, poker1eh.......

Example of increasing your EV by betting appropriately

The EV of the bonus discussed in the previous posts ($100 + $100 / $2500) with a House Advantage of 0.5% is $187.50. The way in which we can calculate this is to assume your bet size is very small - say, 1 cent. This is important because with a bet size that small you will (almost) never bust out, and your EV just becomes your initial bankroll minus the amount the house will take out of all of your bets:

EV = Initial Bankroll - (HA * WR)

In this case, EV = $200 - 0.5% * $2500 = $187.50. QED.

I have previously mentioned that there are ways you can slightly increase your EV by wagering in a certain manner, but only by taking on a ton of risk. For example, take the following strategy:

1) Bet $200 (your entire stack) on the first hand
2) If you win, bet $400 on the second hand
3) If you win, bet $800 on the third hand
4) If you win, bet $1100 (exactly enough to meet your $2500 WR)

I think it is pretty obvious that this strategy is highly variant. What is the EV, though? There are 3 cases:

1) You win all bets and end with $2700. Your EV is the probability this happens times the amount you have at the end. In this case, the probability is (0.4975)^4 = 6.1%. This works out to an EV of $165.40

2) You win the first three bets and lose the fourth. EV = (0.4975)^3 * (0.5025) * $500 = $30.94

3) You lose at some point. EV = $0.

Thus the overall EV of this strategy is $165.40 + $30.94 = $196.34 !!! So, by taking on the risk of going bust 88% of the time, making $500 6% of the time, and making $2700 6% of the time, I've managed to increase my EV by a whopping $8.84 - although in terms of percentage, that is a 10% increase in EV. On the other hand, I'm sure the hourly rate is through the roof since you took (at most) a minute to play those hands. :-)

The reason that EV increases is that most of the time in this strategy you don't have to meet the WR - you've gone bust before the House Advantage can act on all $2,500 of your bets. This seems counterintuitive that the more you go bust the higher your EV, but this is exactly what happens with all betting strategies, not just this one. The EV doesn't increase by much (as shown), but it does indeed increase. This also explains why I had to choose a bet size so small that you would never bust out to truly calculate the initial EV - as soon as you have some non-zero chance of going bust, you may not need to wager the full $2500 and your EV goes up a little bit.

We can use one more example just to prove that I'm not playing tricks: the next bonus I will likely do is a $100 + $125 /$4500 bonus. The strategy of betting very small has an EV of

$225 - 0.5% * $4500 = $202.50.

The strategy of betting $225, $450, $900, $1800, $1125 will satisfy your $4500 WR, with the following EV:

1) Win them all: (0.4975)^5 * $4725 = $144.00
2) Win first 4, lose last one: (0.4975)^4 * (0.5025) * $2475 = $76.19
3) Lose at some point = $0

EV = $144.00 + $76.19 = $220.19

Again, the EV doesn't increase by much in dollar terms, but is almost 17% greater. If you (somehow) have the bankroll to withstand the wild swings this strategy would have, a 17% increase in EV may be significant.

For what it is worth, I have plugged the numbers for this new bonus into my spreadsheet and also used an updated "equivalent hands per hour" number of 375 based on the speed of my last bonus. If I choose to continue to flat-bet $3 it should take me 4 hours with a RoR of 6.4% and a RoL of 22.1%. If I bump it down to $2 the numbers become 6 hours, RoR of 3.1%, RoL of 17.3%.

But, really, I just hope a good poker reload comes along. :-)

Blackjack Variance

As promised, some math backing up the variance talk in the last blog post. It seems obvious that increasing your bet size will increase your variance, and (amazingly enough) the math supports that! Adding two columns to my previous table for the $100+$100/$2500 WR at 300 hands/hr:


where RoR is your Risk of Ruin (losing your entire $200 bankroll) and RoL is your Risk of Loss (losing more than your $100 bonus, leaving you in the red for the bonus, but not broke). Some of the RoR numbers for the very large bet sizes are likely incorrect due to the model I used, but the $1-$5 bets should be fine.

To perhaps better visualize these numbers, I present the following graph:

• The green line is at $200, your initial bankroll.
  
• The black line is at $187.50, your EV. Note that this is at the center of these curves, and thus your most likely result.
  
• The red line is at $100, the amount of money you deposited.

The way to interpret this graph is that the area under the curve is proportional to your probability of winning that much money.

For example, take the lowest (purple) curve, gotten by flat-betting $1 over the whole bonus. The area of under the curve to the left of the $100 line is your probability of finishing your bonus with under $100. You can see that area is small compared to the entire area under the curve, thus your chance of finishing in the state is also small. From our table above, that "small number" is actually the 6.4% RoL from the $1 line.

Likewise, there is virtually none of the curve that would appear to the left of $0 (none of it looks "chopped off" by the left hand side of the chart, thus your chance of finishing below $0 is vanishingly small. From our table, that chance is 0.1%.

Note several things about this chart:

• Our EV never changes regardless of how much we bet - it is always $187.50. While not strictly correct, it is correct enough for our purposes.
  
• The larger bet sizes have a much larger variance - note for example the amount of the $5 or $10 curve that is to the left of the $100 line, and the amount that looks chopped off. However, this variance is also manifest on the right side of the chart - the only way your will ever end a bonus with $450+ is to bet $10 or more.
  

As you can see, there is some very wide variance, even for very small bet sizes. Even flat-betting $3/hand will have you losing money almost 20% of the time and going broke entirely about 3% of the time, but will also have you making over $30/hr in the long run. I am personally comfortable with this level of risk, and may even step it up to the $5 level, but I am not comfortable with more than that variance.

Actually, if I ever decided to step up my betting amount, I would likely multi-hand instead of increasing my one-spot bet. For example, 3-spotting $2 has about the same variance of single-spot betting about $3.50. The only issue is whether I can play more (or a similar number) of hands per hour 3-spotting. Maybe I'll try that on my next bonus and see how it goes.

My spreadsheet can also show me how lucky I was to be up $250 on my first bonus. As it turns out, there is a 5% chance the way I played that bonus that I would be up $250 (or more). Always nice to hit the 20-1 shot on my first try. :-)

My next post may be about how the EV of differing betting strategies is not quite the same, but will also so how little EV can be gained by them, at the expense of generating insane amounts of risk.

Blackjack ?!?!?!?!?!?!?

Yes, if you notice my bankroll update in the right hand column, you will see a new category for "blackjack." Has the Poker Geek lost his mind from all the bad beats? Having hit $2,000 since he started, has he just decided to blow his bankroll?

Far from it. The answer pretty much boils down to a combination of "because there was no good poker reload bonuses available" and "because I don't hate money." Even though blackjack is a -EV game even when played with perfect strategy, due to the bonuses currently available at a variety of online casinos it actually becomes a massively +EV endeavor. The basic idea is that the casinos are giving you so much money to play, that it much more than makes up for what you are expected to lose. Read that again - if you play you will lose money on your initial deposit, and there is no strategy and/or betting scheme that can change that. However, the amount of sign-up bonus the casino gives you far outstrips that expected loss amount.

The structure of a typical (cashable) bonus is the following: you make an initial deposit, the casino deposits your bonus money immediately, contingent upon you wagering a total amount of money until the bonus will be satisfied. To give a concrete example, the bonus I just finished (Intercasino) was a 100+100/2500 cashable bonus, meaning that for my deposit of $100, the casino added $100 immediately, and I have to place a total of $2,500 in bets before I can withdraw. The plan is to play perfect basic strategy and make very small bets to reduce the risk of going broke.

What can I expect in profit from this bonus played this way? For the sake of calculation ease I will use the figure of 0.5% as the house advantage against perfect basic strategy. Some sites have even less of a house advantage, and some slightly more, but the 0.5% will do for basic calculation / estimation. This figure means that for every $1 bet, the house will make $0.005. In the case of our $2,500 wagering requirement, this means the house will make (on average) $12.50. Thus, we are left with $187.50 for an (average) profit of $87.50 for this bonus.

As it turns out, you can increase your EV very slightly by betting more, but this also increases your Risk of Ruin. The main reason for me to bet more than the minimum is to trade off a bit of risk in order to decrease my clearing time (thus increasing my hourly rate) - not to increase my EV by a minuscule amount.

OK, so how long would this bonus take to clear? When I played, I was going through a bit more than 300 hands per hour. This seems like a good enough assumption - although this number could likely be pushed closer to 400/hr with dedicated play, better memorizing of the basic strategy chart and focus. Using the 300/hr assumption we obtain the following table:


This hourly rate is much, much greater than at poker (at least at the levels I am currently playing), but as could maybe be expected the variance is greater. Much greater, even for the lowest betting limits. Exactly how much greater? Stay tuned for the next blog post, where I anticipate much more math (and graphs!) As you can see from the amount listed in my bankroll, I ran rather "hot" on this first bonus (cue the conspiracy theorists, please!) winning $250 in a bit under 3 hours by flat-betting $3/hand. This corresponds to about $90/hr, but the expectation for a bonus like this should match the above table - about $31.50/hr for what I was betting. Like I said, I was running hot, and this is just the positive side of the previously mnetioned variance.

There are affiliate sites (much like PSO) that will give you even more cash for signing up through them. For example, I signed up through GamesGifts.com, which will give me an additional $250 for clearing 5 casinos.

A word of warning: Not all sites allow blackjack to clear the bonus. Not all bonuses are cashable - some are "sticky" bonuses, but are best left to after you exhaust all of the available cashable bonuses. Some sites (including Intercasino) charge you a $1 withdrawal fee (kind of ticky-tack, considering the amount you wager with them, but hey, them's the rules.....)

As you can tell, I've done quite a bit of reading on the subject, but am no means an expert. Anyone interested enough in this can follow up with pages off of casinobonuswhores.com, casinodave.com, and the 2+2 Internet Bonuses message boards.

I don't enjoy this as much as I do poker - how could I? I personally get no thrill out of the act of betting itself (in fact, I'm likely one of the more risk-averse people you'll ever meet), and there is no decision-making / strategizing anywhere. It is just reading a strategy right off a chart, and makes you feel like a blackjack-playing robot. At the same time, I don't hate money, and would hate to not take advantage of the situation as it exists right now. I expect to split my time somewhat between blackjack and poker and see how it goes.

A heater at $1/$2

So, due to a combination of chasing a specific fish, dropping 50+ BB at $0.50/$1 the night before, and some prodding from poker1eh, I decided to play a bit of $1/$2 this weekend. I figured, what better site than Paradise to try it? I was just clearing the last of my bonus there, and the tables there are the softest of any site I've tried. For the record, the only site I had tried $1/$2 at before was Prima, and I got absolutely hammered (lost $83 in 1400 hands or so).

Well, today the deck ran me over. I made $67.25 in 84 hands, for a nice clip of 40 BB/100. :-) I take no credit for any of it - it was all good hands and having them hold up. Note this still leaves me in the red for $1/$2 overall, but certainly doesn't hurt the bankroll or the confidence. A sample of hands:

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The very first hand I played:

Paradise Poker, Limit: $1/$2, 10 players

Pre-flop: (10 players) Hero is CO with 9♠ 9♦

UTG calls, 4 folds, MP3 calls, Hero raises, 2 folds, BB calls, UTG calls, MP3 calls.

Flop: 9♣ T♣ T♠ (4.5SB, 4 players)

BB checks, UTG checks, MP3 checks, Hero checks.

Turn: J♣ (2.25BB, 4 players)

BB bets, UTG folds, MP3 calls, Hero raises, BB folds, MP3 calls.

River: 6♥ (7.25BB, 2 players)

MP3 checks, Hero bets, MP3 calls.

Results:

Final pot: 9.25BB

MP3 shows T♥ 4♥

Knowing what he had, I likely missed some bets. The turn card was a total action killer.

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Paradise Poker, Limit: $1/$2, 10 players

Pre-flop: (10 players) Hero is MP3 with J♥ J♣

4 folds, MP2 calls, Hero raises, Button folds, SB calls, BB calls, MP2 calls.

Flop: A♦ J♠ 2♥ (8SB, 5 players)

SB checks, BB folds, MP2 bets, Hero calls, SB calls.

Turn: 8♣ (5.5BB, 4 players)

SB checks, MP2 bets, Hero raises, SB folds, MP2 calls.

River: 7♠ (9.5BB, 3 players)

MP2 checks, Hero bets, MP2 calls.

Results:

Final pot: 11.5BB

MP2 shows A♠ K♣

Wow - hate to be selfish, but I feel like should have gotten more action from the big Ace!

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Paradise Poker, Limit: $1/$2, 10 players

Pre-flop: (10 players) Hero is MP2 with A♠ A♦

UTG calls, UTG+1 calls, 2 folds, Hero raises, 2 folds, Button calls, SB folds, BB 3-bets, UTG folds, UTG+1 calls, Hero caps, Button calls, BB calls, UTG+1 calls.

Flop: 5♠ 6♠ K♠ (17.5SB, 4 players)

BB checks, UTG+1 checks, Hero bets, Button folds, BB calls, UTG+1 calls.

Turn: 9♥ (10.25BB, 3 players)

BB bets, UTG+1 calls, Hero raises, BB folds, UTG+1 calls.

River: 4♣ (15.25BB, 2 players)

UTG+1 checks, Hero bets, UTG+1 calls.

Results:

Final pot: 17.25BB

UTG+1 shows J♥ 8♣

Yes, if you are counting, UTG+1:

• Limped in EP with J8o
• Called 2 cold back to him preflop
• Called the cap preflop
• Stuck around on the flop with no pair, no draw in a pot that was 4-way capped PF.
• Called down with jack high

He's now on my buddy list. :-)

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These were by no means the only hands I won over those 84, but I'm sure my readers can only take so much!

Poker Hiatus

This is gonna be a short post - I will be going on vacation from July 1-9 and will not be playing over that time. In fact, since I haven't played since clearing my Prima bonus last weekend, by the time I get back and into it again it will be over two weeks without playing a hand. Longest break since I started on this journey. At the very least I'll have a nice bonus / site to come back to - just today Paradise put out a 25% up to $100, 10x bonus with no expiry. Sweet.

And, just to get some math in, it occurs to me that I can use my PokerTracker database (which is now over 200K hands!) to answer a simple question - is there anyone out there losing at a rate that is greater than they could clear (say) a 10x bonus?

To take a concrete example, let's take the above Paradise bonus (10x, $100) and see what that works out to if you clear at $0.50/$1.00. The percentage of hands at that level which are raked according to my database is about 43.5%, so to get 1,000 raked hands, one would need to play about 2,300 dealt-hands. In order to lose money overall, they'd have to lose $100 in those 2,300 hands, which works out to -4.35 BB/100.

So, I did a filter in my database of all players at $0.50/$1.00 who have played at least 2,300 hands at that level. I have 46 players in this category. As it turns out, there is only ONE player out of those 46 that is losing at a rate greater than that. In fact, this person is losing at an amazing rate of -8.5 BB/100 over 3,000 hands. The next-worst player is losing at -3.46 BB/100, just to give you some perspective on how bad this guys' play is. No, neither of those players are me. And, no, I'm not going to tell you their screen names! :-)

The other 45 people are either winning or are losing slowly enough that the would come out of such a 10x bonus still cash-positive, which only reinforces my previous calculations about bonus chasing.

The corresponding numbers at $1/$2 are 1600 dealt-hands and -3.1 BB/100. I actually have 4 out of 42 players losing at that rate or greater over a 1,600+ hand stretch. I really don't know what to make of that as compared to the $0.50/$1.00 numbers, but just thought I'd throw it out there.

$3/$6 at Casino Windsor

Well, poker1eh and I decided to go play a bit of live poker Saturday night - a bit of $3/$6 limit Hold'Em at Casino Windsor. Given that our other options were $1/$2 NL ($100 max buy-in), or $10/$20 NL ($500 min buy-in), I think we chose the right game.

My primary goal for the night was to pay attention and see how accurately I could put people on hands. Specifically (given how these games have gone before - typical low-limit limp-fests) I wanted to pay particular attention to what players chose to raise with preflop or take aggressive action on postflop. My secondary goal was to play "proper" poker - that is, to ensure that I'd play the hand exactly the same way as if I was playing $0.50/$1, ignoring the fact that I was playing for 6 times the stakes.

We arrived at a bit after 6:00 (to try and beat the Friday night crowd) and amazingly enough both got seated immediately at the same table. Much to poker1eh's delight (I'm sure), he got the seat two to my left. In the first button revolution it was readily apparent that this was a typical fishy table - I don't think we saw a preflop raise for at least 2 button revolutions, and had 5-6 people to the flop. We even had one guy who was somewhat unsure how that whole betting-thing worked, and seemed to call down with anything. Yum.

A few hands I remember from the evening:

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Not too far into the evening: early position limper, folded to me in late position, I raise with AQ, knock out the blinds and get it heads up.

Flop Axx. Check/bet/call
Turn K. Check/bet/call (although he took a LONG time to call that bet)
River 6. Check/bet/call

He flips over A6. I guess I should be fortunate he didn't raise me on the river. Nice 3 outer.

---

44 in mid position, I limped behind another limper, the guy to my left raised, and knocked out everyone else except me (including the original limper) .

Flop J44.

Wow. I thought only online games were rigged. :-)

I check/called the flop.
Turn was a blank. I checked (going for the check-raise), and the guy checked behind. Bummer.
I bet the river blank and he called. He didn't show but claimed he had no part of the board and would have folded to a turn bet from me. Oh why couldn't he have had a big pair or AJ?

---

Early position limper, folded to me in the CO, I limp with JTs, and the button raises. He knocks out both blinds but keep me and the EP limper.

Flop AQTr

check/check/button bets, EP calls, I call. Pot is easily big enough to try to hit one of my 6 outs (4 Kings, 2 tens)

Turn K. And EP bets into me! Sweet! I raise, the button calls and EP calls.
River blank, checked to me, I bet, and both call.

EP had KT, button had AA. Nice pot - I figured for sure I would have to split it with one of them. I am truly shocked that both of them call my river bet.

---

It was folded around to me in the CO, and I raised with AQo. Poker1eh took a long time to think about it in the SB and finally called, as did the BB.

Flop 3 low rags.
It was checked to me, I bet, poker1eh called, and we lost the BB.
Turn another low rag. poker1eh checked, and I checked behind.
River was yet another rag, poker1eh bet out and I called. He showed down A-worse kicker and I win.

This was definitely a "read" play - when he took so long to call preflop, I knew it wasn't a pair or suited connectors or anything, more than likely two high cards. And by the river I was ahead (or tied) with every high card hand except AK, and that one he would have three-bet me with preflop. Thus the call. Of course, if I was that sure of my read, I should have raised him. :-)

---

An MP raiser, and I 3-bet in the SB with AK. We lose everyone else, and he just calls.

Flop 3 low rags. I bet, he calls
Turn another rag. I bet, he calls
River another rag, I check, he bets, I call and get shown KK.

The only reason I fired again on the turn is that I had seen this guy raise in EP with A9 a button revolution previously. But in general he was showing down pretty good hands, so even if I did fire at the turn, at the very least I could have (reasonably safely) folded to the river bet.

---

Few limpers, I get a free look in the BB with 65o.

Flop 955. I bet out and only an EP caller sticks around.
Turn A. I bet out, and get called
River 5. (!!!!!!). I bet out, get raised, I 3-bet, and he only calls me. Flips up Ax and I take down a nice one.

Yes, if you're counting, that's two quads for me tonight. As a side note, the very next hand after this one, the guy I just beat flopped a flush and lost to turned quad queens. Yes, one guy lost to quads on two consecutive hands. Like I said, I thought only online games were fixed.....

---

It was a limpfest, and I limped in the CO with Kx suited.

Flop QQx with two of my suit. Bet from EP, I call, and the button calls.
Turn 8, completing my flush. EP bets, I raise, we lose the button, and EP 3-bets. I actually said "this is gonna get expensive" at this point, to which poker1eh replied "looks like it already is" I just call the 3-bet.
River was a blank, call his river bet and get shown Q8. Ouchy.

---

How did I do as far as my goals? As far as the first goal (pay attention, and putting people on hands), I give myself an B+. I was shocked how easy it was to put some people on hands. The only reason I don't get a better grade is that by the end of the night (about 6 and a half hours!) my attention had started to decrease. As far as playing "proper" poker, I think I'll give myself an A-. Preflop I think I played very well given the loose conditions (e.g. pocket pairs and suited aces playable from any position for a limp) and postflop I think I only got out of line twice (the AK hand above, and a flush+OESD that I check/raised on the turn heads up). I missed one or two equity value raises with a flush draw with 2+ opponents which is something that I need to work on in my online game as well, so I can't blame the stakes for that one. I'm actually very happy with the way I played my draws - it seemed none of them came in, but that didn't make them any less correct to play.

At the end of the night I was up $11. Figure even with the shuffle machine we saw (at most) 35 hands an hour, or somewhere around 225 hands the whole night for a winrate of 0.8 BB/100.

But, you start doing the math and see how expensive it is to play at a casino and how much better this win would have been if I had just played the same hands at $3/$6 online:

1) The dealer toke. By rough estimate, I probably won about 15 pots over the evening, each of which had a dealer toke of $1. Thats $15 that would have remained in my stack if I was online.

2) The increased rake. The casino rake is double what the online rake is: 10%, although it caps at $5. Again, figure I won 15 pots over the evening and each one was about 5 BB ($30), and thus raked $3. So I paid $45 in rake over the evening, of which I'd have only paid $22.50 in rake online. That would be another $22.50 in my stack.

So, all in all, if the same events would have transpired online, I'd estimate my I would have ended the night up almost $50 instead of the $11 I actually won. Like I said, expensive!

Just for fun, let's figure out how much the toke and rake are in terms of BB/100. If you use my average win rate online to judge how many pots I'll typically win, it'll be about 8.5%, so I'll pay $8.50/100 hands, or 1.4 BB/100 just in toke. Likewise, if those 8.5 pots are raked at an average of $3, I will pay $25.50 in rake, or $12.25 more per 100 hands than online. That is about 2 BB/100 in increased rake.

So, the conclusion is that it actually costs you about 3.4 BB/100 in increased costs to play $3/$6 at this casino! Think about it - that is truly amazing. If you are crushing the low limit games online to the tune of 3 BB/100 (which I am not), you would actually be a 0.4 BB/100 loser playing the same game at the casino. I knew that casino play was expensive, but I really had no idea how expensive. That being said, I think the competition at the casino is far weaker than even an awesome Party table, but 3.4 BB/100 is a hell of a disadvantage to try to overcome.

But, looked at another way, it is actually a pretty cheap way to spend an evening. For a more typical 5 hour playing session, 3.4 BB/100 works out to about $35. That's only $7/hr which is a remarkably cheap way to spend a Saturday evening. In fact, that's a (much) lower hourly rate than I spent on golf earlier that day, plus I actually have a chance to do something I like and have a chance to come home with more money than I started with (unlike golf!).

Ah Prima, you !@#!% b1tch......

Well, it has been a while since my last blog post, and I can't really say that poker has treated me that well. Or, rather, I should say Prima hasn't treated me too well. Here is my last month of play at Prima:


The upswing at the right was last night, where they evidently let some fish loose on the Prima network - instead of the usual 16-20% table VPIP and $4 average pots, we had 40-55% VPIP and $7-11 average pots. I have never seen a night like it on Prima yet, but hope it continues - I have some ground to make up!

I have some bizarre numbers over the 2,000 hands I've played there - my worst hands are

• AA (-2.25 BB/hand) - won 3 out of 8, and all three of those were either blind steals or over on the flop.
• AKo (-1.39 BB/hand) - won 4 out of 14, and two of those were blind steals.
• 99 (-1.19 BB/hand) - won 2 out of 4, with one blind steal.
• 88 (-1.12 BB/hand) - won 1 out of 13. At least it was a decent pot and not a blind steal
  
• AQo (-0.91 BB/hand) - won 5 out of 19 with two of them blind steals.
  

I was actually down $54 on my first 49 pairs there, but have "come back" and now I am "only" down $10 on my 113 pairs that I've seen. Hard to win with numbers like that.....

Oh, and I made a bankroll update and will attach my latest "overall" graph:


I am within one night of clearing Bet365 and was going to head over to PokerRoom to get away from Prima, but if the fish are going to stay at there I may look up a Wild Jack bonus or some such.

Running bad

Well, after my run-up of 5+ BB/100 for 5000 hands, Karma decided to slap me upside the face:



That's a 140 BB downswing, and -3.22 BB/100 over my last two bonuses (about 3,100 hands). I've reviewed some hands, and in some cases I may have not been aggressive as I could, but in a lot of cases this is just expensive second-best hands and draws not coming in. Probably the exact opposite of my upswing, where every draw seemed to come in.

But the most amazing thing of all? I'm actually up about $30 in real-money during this downswing due to playing under a bonus for that time. How crazy is that?

That being said, I'm burned out enough by this downswing that I'm going to take a few days off and do a combination of read, review my game, and just plain chill. I have a Paradise Bonus I need to clear, but no hurry on it, and no "logical" next bonus to clear.

On a positive note, I made my first concrete purchase funded by poker - a new digital camera! All hail poker on the Internet!

$10,500 freeroll

As mentioned in my last blog post, another MTT was on my horizon - this time a $10,500 freeroll on Mother's Day (of all days). As it turns out, only 75 people decided to battle for all that money! It was therefore the equivalent (from a prize money perspective) as a $140 buy-in MTT. Amazing. Even more amazing is that the top 30 pay, starting with $52.50 for 30th place and moving up to the top prize of $1,995.

Initial stacks are 2,000 and the blinds start at 10/20, so at least we start with a decent amount of chips. I expect play to be VERY tight with that much money and that short a field.

My first key hand comes up only 11 minutes in, still in the first blind level:

Blinds: $10.00/$20.00, 9 players

Stack sizes:
UTG: $2000.00
UTG+1: $1970.00
MP1: $2325.00
Hero: $1885.00
MP3: $2030.00
CO: $2060.00
Button: $1840.00
SB: $1910.00
BB: $1950.00

Pre-flop: (9 players) Hero is MP2 with J♥ J♦
3 folds, Hero raises to $75, MP3 raises to $300, 4 folds, Hero calls.

Flop: 9♦ 2♣ 7♥ ($630, 2 players)
Hero bets $255, MP3 raises to $510, Hero calls.

Turn: 4♦ ($1650, 2 players)
Hero checks, MP3 bets $580, Hero folds.

Ouch. Half of my stack gone on that hand. Guy claims he had AA, and I believe him. I would have (and probably should have) folded to the flop raise, but my thought was that it was a min-raise and was worth calling. Fuzzy thinking - I'm pretty sure I'm playing to 2 outs, and the stacks aren't big enough to give me the implied odds I need to try to hit the J: I know I stack him if I hit my J, but to call $255 with 22-1 odds he'd have to have at least 5K left in front of him to make it worth my while, which he obviously didn't. Bad play, and I lost $255 more than I needed to here.

I get a very small amount back a few minutes later with:

Blinds: $10.00/$20.00, 9 players

Stack sizes:
UTG: $1840.00
UTG+1: $1910.00
MP1: $1940.00
MP2: $1970.00
MP3: $1970.00
CO: $2295.00
Hero: $1045.00
SB: $2900.00
BB: $2100.00

Pre-flop: (9 players) Hero is Button with 10♥ 10♣
UTG folds, UTG+1 calls, 4 folds, Hero raises to $85, 2 folds, UTG+1 calls.

Flop: 8♠ 8♦ 2♥ ($200, 2 players)
UTG+1 checks, Hero bets $125, UTG+1 folds.

and then give it all back almost immediately with:

Blinds: $15.00/$30.00, 9 players

Stack sizes:
UTG: $1820.00
UTG+1: $1985.00
MP1: $1925.00
MP2: $1910.00
MP3: $2205.00
Hero: $1085.00
Button: $2855.00
SB: $2185.00
BB: $1985.00

Pre-flop: (9 players) Hero is CO with 2♥ 2♣
5 folds, Hero raises to $65, Button folds, SB calls, BB folds.

Flop: A♣ K♣ 6♦ ($160, 2 players)
SB checks, Hero bets $85, SB calls.

Turn: 3♣ ($330, 2 players)
SB checks, Hero checks.

River: Q♦ ($330, 2 players)
SB bets $150, Hero folds.

I'm now under 1,000, which at this point is under 30 BB. I'm getting shortstacked already, and we're only 20 minutes in! I start tightening way up, and don't play much of anything until the blinds are 50/100 and I'm sitting on 785 chips. All-in or fold from here on out, methinks.

• I push with AJo unopened, no caller. Up to 935.
• I take a round of blinds, back down to 785.
• I push with JJ in EP2, no caller. Up to 935.
• I take the BB and someone with only 110 pushes, and I call with JTo for the additional 10. I win against A9o when I spike a T on the river. Up to 1020.

We hit our first break and only 15 people (or so) have busted out. Still a LONG way to go, and I believe I am 58th chip position out of the 60 people left. Blinds go up to 75 /150 out of the break, so I'm still in an all-in or fold situation.

• I push with 66 in MP1, no caller. Up to 1245.
• I take a round of blinds, back down to 1020.
• I push with KQo on the button, no caller. Back up to 1245.
• I take a round of blinds, back down to 1020.
• I push with KK in MP2, no caller. Up to 1245.
• I take two sets of blinds and get semi-involved with a free look in my BB and lose a bit. Down to 870.

Somewhere around here I officially become "last place guy" and am 55th of of 55 remaining.

Blinds go up to 100/200. First hand of the new blinds:

Blinds: $100.00/$200.00, 10 players

Stack sizes:
UTG: $4460.00
UTG+1: $1852.50
UTG+2: $2835.00
MP1: $3430.00
MP2: $2530.00
MP3: $5030.00
Hero: $870.00
Button: $3185.00
SB: $1035.00
BB: $2030.00

Pre-flop: (10 players) Hero is CO with 4♥ 4♦
6 folds, Hero raises all-in $870, Button calls, 2 folds.

Button shows A♦ Q♦

Flop: 10♥ 10♠ 6♣ ($2040, 1 player + 1 all-in - Main pot: $2040)

Turn: 7♠ ($2040, 1 player + 1 all-in - Main pot: $2040)

River: 3♦ ($2040, 1 player + 1 all-in - Main pot: $2040)

Results: Final pot: $2040

Whew. I win the coin flip and I go over 2,000 chips for the first time in the tournament - over 80 minutes in! I still only have 10 BB, so more all-in or fold.....

• Very next hand I pick up AQo in MP2, push, no caller. Up to 2340.
• I get a free look in a BvB and bet the flop when checked to. Up to 2440.
• I go card dead and fold a few set of blinds.

Blinds go up to 150/300.

• I push ATo in MP3, no caller. Up to 2290.
• A stack shorter than a BB goes all-in while I'm in the BB with 96o. I'm against 88, but hit a 9 on the river. Up to 2467.
• I win a BvB. Up to 2917.
• I min-raise 44 in MP3 (WHAT?!?! I don't have enough chips to pull this off!!!!), the button goes all-in and has me covered. I fold. Down to 2162. This is horrible play by me, but may have saved my bacon.
• I lose a BvB, down to 1712.

Then, what I could argue is the key hand of the tournament for me:

Blinds: $150.00/$300.00, 8 players

Stack sizes:
UTG: $7065.00
UTG+1: $5285.00
MP1: $4710.00
MP2: $2357.50
CO: $9582.50
Button: $3030.00
SB: $2660.00
Hero: $1412.50

Pre-flop: (8 players) Hero is BB with 9♣ 9♠
2 folds, MP1 raises to $900, 4 folds, Hero raises all-in $1412.5, MP1 calls.

MP1 shows A♣ 10♦

Flop: K♠ 9♥ 5♥ ($3275, 1 player + 1 all-in - Main pot: $2975, Sidepot 1: $300)

Turn: J♣ ($3275, 1 player + 1 all-in - Main pot: $2975, Sidepot 1: $300)

River: 8♦ ($3275, 1 player + 1 all-in - Main pot: $2975, Sidepot 1: $300)

Results: Final pot: $3275

YES! For what it is worth, we still haven't hit the money, but are quite close and my stack is now big enough to "coast" to the money should I choose to. But I don't.

The blinds go up to 200/400. Still less than 10 BB, so more all-in or fold.....

• I push ATo in the cutoff, no callers. Up to 3975.
• I take a round of blinds.
• I push KK from the button, no callers. Up to 4575.
• Very next hand, I raise to 955 with AJs from the cutoff, no callers. Up to 5175.
• I win a button vs BB with complete air. Up to 5730.

The blinds go up to 300/600. I think we hit the money bubble somewhere around here.

• I take a round of blinds.
• I push AKo from the cutoff, no callers. Up to 6030.
• I push KK UTG, no callers. Up to 6930

I am in the top 10 in chip position. Amazing - how many times in an MTT structure have I pulled this trick off? Chip and a chair.....

Blinds go up to 400/800.

A short stack (530) pushed UTG, I raised another 2155 with KQo. UTG had AA and won. Lucky for him - he'd have had to go all-in blind on the very next hand and needed FAR less than AA here. Thus my raise with KQo. But I'm down to only 6670, due to picking up some dead blind money from the deal.

I think we get down to 20 people somewhere around here.

• I take a bunch of blinds and am down to 4270.
• I push ATs on the button, no callers. Up to 5470.
• I take the BB at 400/800, then the SB at 500/1000, then another round of blinds at 500/1000 with no cards at all. Not even steal-worthy cards. Down to 2670, under 3 BB, and insanely desperate.

I pick up KTs on the button, but poker1eh has raised before me - enough to put me all-in. Probably should have called, but folded.

Time for the ever-present math portion of my posts:

Assuming both blinds fold, it would have been 2670 to win 6840, so I only need to win 39% of the time to make a profitable call here. He says he had AQo. PokerStove tells me I have 41% equity here against this exact hand, so even if he flips his hand over, I have a marginal call. Against his entire range of hands he COULD have, I think I messed this one up big-time. Against (for example) any pair, any two broadway, I am 47.8%. I needed to make that call, even if I went busto doing it. Plus, I only have 4 more hands until I have to post a BB which will resign me to going all in with almost any two cards. Am I likely to get a better hand or situation than KJs in the next 4 hands? Likely not. I suck. :-)

Amazingly enough, though, just two hands later I pick up KJo in MP3 and push. The SB re-raises to get the BB out of the way and flips over 55. Coin flip. The board comes A998Q and I go out in 13th place, winning $210. Not bad for just under 3 hours worth of work, though.

My buddy poker1eh actually had the chip lead with about 16 people to go and wound up taking 6th for $525, busting out on TT vs. 99 when a 9 hit the board. My brother took 32nd place (just out of the money) when he had AK vs. QQ. He improved with an A, but so did the QQ with another Q.

I can't wait until the next one - I could play short field 10K freerolls every day!

In terms of analyzing my (possible) mistakes made:

My early JJ hand - I don't know if I'm supposed to lose more there or less there. JJ vs. AA is going to be painful when both remain overpairs. Maybe if I'm a better NL player I actually fold that one to the re-raise preflop: he re-raised about 1/7 of my stack - is it worth it to continue? Especially if I don't spike a J?

My min-raise with 44 late in the tourney. Donkey. Either fold it or go all in with less than 10 BB.

My KK pushes that only picked up the blinds:

• KK in MP2 with 7 BB
• KK OTB with 9 BB
• KK UTG with 10 BB

One can argue I could have min-raised any of them (especially the UTG one) and then hoped someone tried coming over the top so I could at least pick up a little extra $. But I really don't mind the pushes - I figure eventually someone is eventually going to get sick of me pushing and call, and I don't really mind not seeing flops and letting the random Ax I let in for cheap hitting their A. Stealing is worth 1.5 BB, and is a significant chunk of change at that point.

As far as tightness, I folded all the below hands preflop. Unless otherwise noted, all are unopened to me, and are in time order in the tourney. Some of these are obvious mistakes, but nowhere near all of them. They are also lacking context (BB willingness to defend, where the big/short stacks are, how close to the bubble we are, etc.) which makes them hard to look at in list form this way, but I figure I'll lay them all out anyways, and I can look up the specific situation if any of my readers wish to debate my play. :-)

• Folded KJo in EP2 with 40 BB.
• Folded Q9o on the button with 35 BB.
• Folded 99 in EP2 with 30 BB.
• Folded 66 UTG with 30 BB.
• Folded 88 UTG with 30 BB.
• Folded QJs in MP1 with 18 BB
• Folded A9o in CO with 9 BB.
• Folded 66 in MP1 with 8 BB
• Folded 88 UTG with 12 BB.
• Folded A9o in CO with 6 BB
• Folded 99 OTB to a 3 BB raise by MP3 who had me covered when I only had 10 BB
• Folded ATo in MP2 with 6 BB
• Folded A8o OTB with 8 BB
• Folded KTs in MP1 with 13 BB
• Folded KJo in EP3 with 10 BB
• Folded A4o OTB with 11 BB

Miscellany

Well, I figure in tribute to my new reader from work (hey, Shane!), the "official" passing of 3 months since I started, just clearing a bonus, and running insanely well that I'd throw a hodge-podge of junk into a post:

I've changed some of the sidebar items to have a "permanent" home for my bankroll updates and any assorted statistics / trivia / leaks may be on my mind at the time.

Summary of my journey so far: started with $75 from an Instant Bankroll promotion, and played at the PartyPoker $0.15/$0.30 beginner tables. I have had some success at both freeroll No Limit tournaments and ring limit play, and have built my bankroll to over $1,000 playing (on average) about 10 hours per week. I am thinking about clearing at least a portion of my new bonus at $1/$2. At the very least I am bankrolled for it now.

From a previous post on personal variance, the last graph you saw of mine was a 120BB+ downturn. As a result of this downturn I posted on a question on the 2+2 message boards about what win rate was likely sustainable. As chance would have it, a very generous guy (hey, Chuck!) offered to review my hand histories. Since literally that moment on, I have been playing well and running well (click image to enlarge):



The very bottom of that downswing is where Chuck started critiquing my hand histories, and I have been running at nearly 5.4 BB/100 over the nearly 6000 hands since then.

I mentioned I may try to clear my next bonus (Poker Rewards, 25% up to $50, 10x) at $1/$2. One of the reasons I am even considering this is it would be a good experiment in using all the data I have gathered via datamining the Prima sites. I have almost 45,000 hands in my PokerTracker database at $1/$2, even though I have never played a single hand at that level. Pretty cool for getting a line on people you've never played against before at a new level.

My overall assessments of the poker sites - Party and Paradise are absolute fish havens, but the Prima skins are pretty well populated with a much higher percentage of good players. I plan on continuing to bonus-whore for quite some time, but could really see myself settling down ay Party and/or Paradise. The games are just that soft there.

Well, I told you all this was a random assortment. Shane, between myself, poker1eh, and my brother (QuadMan) I think we've all proven that money is here to be made online. It isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, and you'll go through some emotional rollercoaters - far more than you would think over this "insignificant" amount of money. But if you're really interested and willing to put the time in to study and get better, it can be fun and profitable. Come join the club!

Next up, the $10,000 Poker Rewards freeroll on Sunday night. I sure hope my No Limit game hasn't suffered from playing limit for so long.....