2007 goals

Well, this post was originally going to be me working through my own thought processes on what my 2007 goals are and some of the concrete steps I can take to achieve them. But due to the recent upheaval due to Neteller and other payment processors leaving the market, I don't know how far into 2007 I can even look ahead to plan. At best, I can vow to remove known leaks in my game and to "get better" in general but setting any kind of "earn goal" seems out of reach now. I don't know what the game selection will be like, what bonuses I will even be able to take advantage of, or whether I'll even be able to play (or want to play) come 6 months from now.

It may just be a timing coincidence (or not), but it seems there has been a "ripple effect" of the Neteller exit from the poker market on the quantity and quality of the games at Full Tilt. To give two examples:

1. I hopped online one evening this last weekend to get a few hours of play in. The site traffic was decent, but out of the 40-ish tables of 1/2 and 2/4 (both full ring and 6-max) I could not find a single table that I was interested in sitting at. Full Tilt has always been somewhat on the tight-TAGGY side, but I can usually find at least 3-4 tables that are worth getting on the waiting list for, if I can at least get the right seat. That night, not only was there not any obvious lucrative tables, there didn't even appear to be any mediocre tables with possible decent seats. It was that bad. The next night wasn't much better.
   
2. I sometimes try to hop onto Full Tilt before work to get a quick 30 minutes on play in. The opposition at that time of day seems softer than the evening crew, and out of the 10-15 tables for me to choose from (at the levels previously mentioned), I almost never have any issue finding a selection of decent-to-great tables with 2-3 fish apiece. This morning I logged in to find only 7 total tables occupied, and all but one of them I had absolutely no interest in sitting at. The one semi-decent table was only such because there was one obvious fish sitting.
   

I'll check back in over the next few mornings and evenings, but this certainly does not bode well. Perhaps Stars has remained a bit looser, but I have my doubts.

Anyway, on to the original point of the posts - my 2007 goals, such that I can make them.

Dig out of my $2/$4 full ring hole

As you all know, I decided to take a 40 BB challenge at $2/$4 FR, ran horribly, but decided to stay there since I had convinced myself the games were softer than the corresponding $1/$2 games.

• Bad News: I'm currently down about 50 BB at this level.
• Good News: This is up from my "bottom" of 85 BB.
• Bad News: I haven't seen a good $2/$4 FR table in weeks.
  

I will not sit at a bad $2/$4 table just to prove I can dig out of this hole, but it does truly bug me that this my only level in PokerTracker that I have lost money at.

Work on river value betting.

In general, I leave a LOT of money on the table on the river. Many times, I seem content to check a hand down on the river to see if my hand is good, especially if a scare card hit the river. I tend to give my opponents too much credit on the river for good hands regardless of whether my reads throughout the hand support them having that hand. I also seem to fear the river checkraise (even from non-tricky opponents), resulting in me checking hands as strong as top two pair when checked to me after the flush card hit on the river (for example). This is obviously bad the majority of the time. Sure, sometimes he'll have the flush and I'll have to pay off a c/r, but the majority of the time he'll have a second-best hand that he'll pay off with, leaving me in the positive overall. Other examples like this abound. I really need to learn to trust my reads and extract value where appropriate.

Blind defense

I am better at blind defense than I used to be (especially in the BB), but I still have at least one big hole: I tend not to 3-bet out of the blinds vs. probable steal raisers without monsters. For example, it is folded around to a TAGGY cutoff and he open-raises. If I have 77 in the SB, this should be an easy 3-bet and an auto-bet on most flops, but in the past I have been hesitant to make this raise. Being on the receiving end of such plays shows exactly how strong a move this is, and I don't do enough of it myself. Taking the initiative by 3-betting pre-flop has a lot of value with more hands than just big pocket pairs and AK and I need to learn to take advantage of this.

Opening up my game preflop

My current VPIP/PFR preflop statistics look like:

16/9 (full-ring)
19/12 (6-max)

These are both tighter than what I think is ideal. If I am truly a good player (or at least, better than my opponents at the table), I should be seeking to play more pots against these opponents, especially in position.

I'd like to see my FR stats look like my current 6-max stats (19/12), and my 6-max stats to be somewhere in the 25/15 range. It is estimated on 2+2 that the maximum profitable stats for a 6-max player is something like 30/20, but I'm not that good. Yet.

Note that the difference between where I am at full ring (16/9) and where I think I should be (19/12) is entirely in the amount that I raise preflop - if I can "squeeze out" an extra 3% raise percentage, it brings me to where I want. Therefore, I need to look for more preflop raising opportunities. In the 6-max case, the gap between 19/12 and 25/15 consists of an additional 3% raises and 3% calls preflop.

In order to do accomplish these, I need to do at least the following:

Isolation-raise more often. When a weak player (or two) limps in behind me, I need to raise it up with weaker hands than I might have ordinarily done so in the past. Middle pairs, suited aces, or other A-big are ideal for this sort of play. These hands have an equity advantage over the two (presumably) almost random hands the fish are playing and I have position and I have dead money from the blinds. As an extreme example of this, if a fish limps, I have the button and the blinds are tight it may be right to raise it up with a hand as weak as K9s or so to isolate.

Steal more often. My attempt to steal % is pretty low by "good" player standards - I believe I am somewhere in the 25% range, and I need to get that up into the 30-40% range. There's no solution to this other than "pick more hands to steal with in late position" and then play poker postflop if called.

3-bet from the blinds more often. I've already covered this in a previous paragraph.

Loosen up a tad bit with "limp behind" hands in 6-max, especially on the button. Position rules, especially in 6-max. I certainly don't wan to overdo it, but I think connectors (mostly suited, but some unsuited too) a bit weaker than I currently play in late position would suffice for this. Typically 6-max is a high card game, as there are not enough people in to pad the odds for your draw, but if that situation arises, I need to take advantage of it.

I had medium and long term goals sketched out (in terms of what levels I want to play by the end of the year and some earnings goals making some assumptions about number of hands played, earn rate, bonuses, etc.) but I think the current state of online poker is murky enough that I'll put off those specific goals until the situation becomes clearer.

One of my next post will be a retrospective of my Year In Poker - as of February 7 it will be a year since I took the plunge to play poker online for money. knowing me, there'll be more graphs and random trivia than you can shake a stick at.