Welcome

Hello all, welcome to my online poker blog.

I've been playing on and off for a decade after being introduced by a friend.

I played regularly for a few years during the poker boom and had a decent record at the micros, particularly Rush and Zoom No Limit Hold'em games (here's one of my graphs).

Around 2012 I began a new career which involved immersing myself completely in study in my spare time, so I had little to no time for poker. However recently this burden has eased and so I have been gradually dipping back in.

I'm an amateur player who still hopes to some day beat the rake.





Sunday 15 May 2011

Shitty Session. Fixing Leaks.

Just finished a pretty poor session and dropped a few buy-ins. One pot I got stacked when someone hit a back door flush after I'd got the money in with a set vs overpair. I stacked off with KK versus AA against an unknown (standard). Finally I stuck in a large portion of my stack with the nut flush and folded when the board paired on the river. Villain had telegraphed his hand as a set with his HUD range and bet timing and sizing. So I had raised large for value on the turn when my nut hand came in - and he called which is predictable for this type of player when they are holding a set. Then he pot donks the paired river, so I saved myself the rest of my stack.

I began to tilt a little tonight which surprised me since I'd treated the recent large down-swing so calmly. Maybe I'm tired?

I've been looking through my database and have identified a pretty large leak - my big blind play. My win rate from every position is pretty sound over a decent sample now, but my big blind loss is about 30BB/100 or 60bb/100. This is - IMO - way way too high. I need to spend a lot of time learning how to improve my play in this position. Ideally I'd like it to come down under 50bb/100 and I definitely think that this is realistic, I just need to do some work.

What can I do better?

Well, I filtered my DB earlier and realised that I've been cold calling in the bb after a raise and callers with hands that do poorly out of position in multi way pots. The truth is that suited broadways only flop strong hands and draws a fraction of the time and any time they flop pairs in multi-way pots out of position they are hard to play. I have also been calling with weak pocket pairs in the same scenario. Of course with enough players in the pot and getting good odds set mining in this spot is going to be OK. But I think I was often calling in spots where there were not enough players in the pot (or when the villains' ranges were loose) thus rendering inadequate implied odds. So the first thing I'm going to do is to tighten up with the hands that I cold call with.

I have also noticed that 3-bets are being called a ton of the time. I'm sure this is a result of black Friday taking some of the better players (who can fold) away from the games. So I have begun cutting out most of my light 3-bets from the blinds. Hopefully this will lead to me spewing less in 3-bet pots out of position.

OK so I think it's critical that I fix this problem in my game so I'm going to suspend my post flop work until I've at least got a manageable loss from the bb. This will likely take time but hopefully I'll get there. GL

3 comments:

  1. if you just folded every big blind, that'd be -11 big blinds/100 wouldn't it?

    (isn't bb = big blind and BB = big bet? Can't see the relevance of big bets in NLHE tho...)

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  2. oh, I think I see my mistake :-) It'd be -100bb/100...

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  3. The reason I still talk in BB or big bets sometimes is that pokertracker still uses that 'unit' for it's statistics. I suppose there's no real reason to continue using that language in my posts though.
    The thread you've shown me before on twoplustwo (last red line post ever) estimates a good players big blind losses at around 40bb/100. So as you can see I've got tons of room for improvement in this area, and I'd be happy for it to lie under 50!

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