Heads-Up Play and the Rake

So, it seems that lately Heads-Up (HU) play is all the rage. I have viewed a couple of videos of people playing HU (sample videos from Deuces Cracked, a few posted videos on 2+2) and man is it a different game. Watching it may cause me to be an even bigger showdown monkey shorthanded than I already am.

But actually the most striking thing about the whole deal was not the wacky hands and hyper-aggro play - it was the money that gets taken off the table in rake. In "regular" play (whether 6-max or FR) you tend not to notice how much money is being taken off the table in rake, but in a HU freezeout match, this effect is right in your face.

For example, in the video I finished watching today, two players players faced off at $2/$4 starting with $200 stacks. About 90 minutes later, one of the players was bust and the other had only $311 sitting in front of them. That is $89 in rake - almost $60/hr in the pockets of the casino! And this for nearly no marginal cost of having an extra table in the lobby. Looks like I need to look into opening one of these poker site thingies..... :-)

Anyways, looking at it from the player's position and not the casino, how large a drain is this rake? Well, by the PokerTracker stats that were shown, near the end of the match they had played 326 hands. Admittedly this only seemed to update every 5 minutes or so, so the number may be a bit higher than that. Call it 340 hands, which comes out to about 220 hands per hour. Seems about right. In those 340 hands, they paid 22.25 BB in rake for a rake rate of 6.5 BB/100!!!! That just seems insane. I don't recall off my head what the corresponding rake is for $2/$4 full ring (and it depends on your playing style), but IIRC it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3 BB/100. Short-handed was somewhere around 3-5 BB/100 in rake.

Can 6.5 BB/100 be beaten? I'm sure it can, given the right opponent - table selection becomes paramount. However, it seems to me that two good HU players are just trading their money back and forth until the house gets it all.

My $5/$10 shot, and What Is Next?

I just realized I had never given anyone the results of my 25 BB shot at $5/$10 during the last two days of my bonus clearing. Probably for the obvious reason - because it didn't end positively. I lost $170, but wouldn't have played any of the hands any differently in hindsight - this was 17 BB of pure variance as far as I am concerned. I did learn that 3 outers hurt a bit at $5/$10 though.....

I still cashed out for $2,300+ which is still an amazing run having started at $500 only three months previous. I got the check yesterday, and it will be interesting to see if there is any problems depositing it, given that there was an insert in the envelope saying (essentially) IF THERE IS ANY PROBLEM CASHING THIS CHECK, PLEASE CALL THIS TOLL FREE NUMBER IMMEDIATELY. Not exactly the most confidence-inspiring message. But it appears to be drawn on a bank in the U.S. (Las Vegas, in fact) so hopefully there will be no issue.

So what's next? I think I'm going to take a mini-break (only playing Stars Steps tournaments with FPPs or playing $0.25/$0.50 limit) until the beginning of next year. Then I'll likely roll a significant fraction of my withdrawal back into another Cake skin to continue playing $2/$4 and $3/$6 under a bonus or bonus / rakeback combination.

Unless something horribly interesting comes up while in my mini-break, I wouldn't imagine there will be much to post about until the new year. Happy Holidays, all!

$2,500 and a shot at $5/$10 ???

Last night continued my streak of running crazy-well at Cake and I surpassed $2,500 with two days to go on my bonus.

So it got me to thinking - since I started on the site playing a bankroll of 250 BB ($500 playing $1/$2) and I've tended to add a table at a higher level when I hit 250 BB for that level (I started dabbling at $3/$6 when I hit $1,500), is it time for me to take a shot at $5/$10? Just the thought of it sounds crazy to me - I was grinding out for one-tenth those stakes not that long ago. It is also a psychological thing - being a red-chip game and seeing the sizes of the pots can be a bit offsetting.

But if I look at it rationally, the step from $3/$6 to $5/$10 is less drastic than the doubling of levels from $0.50/$1 to $1/$2 or $1/$2 to $2/$4. Plus, based on recent history of me peeking into the $5/$10 game the play is looser than at the levels I've been playing - VPIPs in the high 30's to low 40's rather than high 20's. Then again, the play is probably better and they can get away with playing more hands.

All that being considered, I've decided to carve out $250 and take a 25 BB run at $5/$10 if the conditions are right in the next two nights. What is the worst that could happen? I lose it all, generate about $20 worth of bonus, and still be sitting on $2,270? I think I can handle that.

If anyone wants to talk me off this ledge, they don't have much time.

A Few Milestones

Short post to mention a few milestones I hit in the past 24 hours:

• Passed $7,000 earned online total
  
• Passed $1,000 earned through limit poker play
  
• Passed $2,000 Cake bankroll (although I ended the evening at $1,978 after two top pair hands ran into AA overpair both times)

It has taken quite a bit of work to get to here, especially given the time off and the lack of really good bonuses to clear - for reference, I passed $5,000 over a year ago.

Quite some time ago I also (nearly) reached $1,000 through limit play right before my massive downswing which left me with negative profit through play. It turns out almost my entire limit earn ($1,020.34, listed at right) is equal to my Cake earn alone in the last 10 weeks: $1,007.84.

Not much else to say. Just felt like a mini-celebration from where I had been. Go me.

How Good Is It Possible To Be?

So, a thought that runs through my head every once in a while: how good of a winrate could you sustain? And not with some sort of able-to-see-your-hole-cards ability like on Absolute Poker, but against a table full of opponents that are bad. Maybe not any-two-cards-bad, but at least as bad as what you see in a live casino.

I know what you're expecting - some mathematical treatment of how you would fare against a table full of players who played top 60% hands. If I had the time and a clear idea of how to do this, I would. However, I do not. But I do have a close alternative - the results of my playing Hold'em on my Palm Pilot, something I tend to do while bored in meetings (yes, Lou, that's what I'm doing. Surprise.)

The AI players in this game are bad. Live game bad, and maybe a bit worse. So, how badly have I hit the game up for?

In 10,401 hands, I am up 2890.9 BB for a winrate of 27.8 BB/100. When I first started writing this article a few weeks ago, I was actually above 30 BB/100, so I am evidently on some sort of downswing. :-)

I (unfortunately) do not have stats that will allow me to calculate VPIP, W$SD, etc. but the adjustments I make for this game that actually carry over to live play are:

1) Open WAY up in late position. I would imagine I'm playing 35-40% of my hands in the cutoff and on the button. This is partially a no brainer, and partially because of the fact that the c/r was not programmed into the AI at all - if the computer checks to you and you bet, the worst you will be faced with is a call. Lesson - against bad, non-tricky opponents you can play a lot of hands with position.

2) Make a ton of river valuebets. When checked to on the river, it is amazing the number of hands you can valuebet if you do not fear a c/r. Again, the lesson is against non-tricky opponents, you can valuebet a lot thinner on the river than you might otherwise think you can.

Now, let me dream that I could run at 30 BB/100 double-tabling $3/$6 at PlayersOnly, thus making somewhere in the neighborhood of $180/hr......