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.

2006 - Year in Review

First of all, sorry to my small (but growing to at least 5!) list of readers if you subscribe to this blog via an RSS feed - I recently did a conversion of my blog to the "new" Blogger and it evidently mixed up the order of my articles in the RSS feed. Hopefully this is a one-time issue.

On to the real content - I've reached the end of my first calendar year playing Internet poker for real money. It has been quite a rush - over 46,000 hands , over 40 blog posts, and (as you can see by the bankroll update to the right) nearly $6,000. It'll be interesting (for me, anyways) to look back on how 2006 looked from a few categories. I'll start out with the category that makes me look Really Good then move down from there so if you get tired of reading by the end, you'll at least think I'm better than I actually am! Now on to a blog post chock-full of charts and graphs.....

Overall 2006 results

The title pretty much says it all - here is a graph that shows all the hands I've played in 2006 at all sites, all levels:

The winrate is a bit lower than I'd have liked (1.35 BB/100) , has a few 150-ish BB slides at the start, and has a stretch of about 10,000 hands (between 18K and 28K) where I just broke even. Even so, this seems to be a slow steady climb implying that I pretty much rock at poker, right? After all 620 BB can't be all bad. Well, let's look at the same graph, but measured in dollars instead of BB:


A bit more variance there at the end (including a few $200-ish drops) but it still doesn't look too outrageously bad. Maybe instead of "rocking" at poker, maybe I'm merely "good". But let's move on to see if that's true....

6 max

Below is a graph of all 6-max hands I played this year, in BB:

Now that's a much nicer rate: 2.61 BB/100 over nearly 13,000 hands. Again, there are a couple of 60-80 BB downswings in there but this seems to look pretty good. Somewhat troubling is the 6,000 hand breakeven stretch in the middle (almost half the hands I've played!) but in general, I can't complain about 330 BB earned at that rate. The story looks even nicer when expressed in dollars:


A nasty $200 slide in the middle, but not much to be worried about.

I find it really quite strange that I seem to have less swings at 6-max than at full ring, as conventional wisdom has it that 6-max is a much "swingier" game. Maybe I'm just lucky at it or (conversely) unlucky at full ring.

OK, now I'm back to thinking I rock at poker. What's next?

Full Ring

Well, simple math should tell you if I'm up 620 BB overall, and 330 BB at 6-max, then I should be up 290 BB at full ring. Ding-ding-ding! You win a prize:

This is where the trouble starts to manifest, perhaps. Three separate 130 BB downswings (including one right at the end of the year), and as of the end of the year I hadn't made any net BB since about my 17,000th hand, meaning for the last 17,000 hands (half my full ring hands played for the entire year!) I have been breakeven in terms of BB. Not good. But wait, it gets worse when expressed in dollars. Avert your eyes if you have a squeamish stomach:

OUCH! Yes, you read that graph correctly - I actually went from being up about $380 to down $50 (a $430 swing!) in about 4,000 hands. I am barely positive in dollar terms for full ring in all of 2006, and that is only due to that little uptick way at the end of the year. This is (primarily) due to the killing that I've been taking at $2/$4 that I've been complaining about in other recent blog posts. The amazing thing about it is that I (evidently) was running so good at $1/$2 6-max at the same time I was hemorrhaging this money at $2/$4 that the "overall" graphs in the first section don't look so bad!

Now, instead of thinking I rock at poker, I get to think I suck. And quite badly.

Monthly and Site-by-Site results

Here is the breakdown by level, by month:

I made money at every level except for $2/$4, and never really had a "bad" month, as most of the months where I was negative were "only" negative by less than 20 BB or so at the primary level I was playing at the time. You can clearly see, however, that my December was saved primarily due to my $1/$2 6-max results when netted against the $2/$4 carnage.

Here are my results when grouped by site, by month:

At least I am net positive on every site, although that was certainly not the case for Full Tilt for quite some time - I was actually down over $150 overall at Full Tilt at one point before going on a "late run" to pull positive for my whole time there. In fact, I went from highly positive there (+$220) to that -$150 in only a little over 2,000 hands. RIGGED! :-)

Live Play

No nifty graphs for this section - only the (depressing) statistic I can give is that I'm down $333 (Canadian) while playing live $3/$6 against competition that seems to be weaker than any I've ever encountered online. Admittedly this is "only" about 55 BB over an estimated 800 hands or so but still disappointing.

In terms of tournaments, I have entered three of the $50+$5 No Limit tournaments there and (although I've reached the final table in two of those three) have not cashed yet. So, another $165 CDN down the tubes.....

Final Thoughts

I was going to make a "2007 Goals" section but, frankly, I'm tired of typing. I'll likely leave that for another blog post soon.

When I started this online journey in February, I would never have imagined that I'd be where I am from a profit perspective. I have a lot of work to do on my game and finding good bonuses in 2007 will be significantly harder after the October legislation, but I'll have fun doing both.

Happy New Year!

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. :-)