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.....