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.





Thursday 20 October 2011

I think I suck at 6-max!

Yeah made a few more mistakes yesterday, and I plan to put in another session later. The question is whether to go back to full ring where my strategy is clearly profitable or to try and develop a winning one for this format. There are advantages and disadvantages of both: I can grow my bankroll taking one path and yet I won't be growing my game; the other path could potentially make me a much better player.

The problem I see at the moment is that I'm losing much more money to the red line (albeit small sample size) than at full ring. Whether this is typical or not I'm yet to find out for sure, but at full ring I lose about half a buy-in every thousand hands which makes it ludicrously easy to make a profit - going to showdown and winning a buy-in per thousand hands or more is pretty easy at full ring cash.

Well my current desire is to continue with 6-max. I may end up banging my head against a brick wall and just giving up and going back to FR but I think I need to try and make the correct adjustments to win. So I need a proper sample size really. Over the weekend I'll get my second monitor set back up and set the other up for a ten table layout (that should get me back to 1k hands per hour). Then I should quickly clock up a reasonable sample size. I somehow think that this isn't going to be easy :S!

I had a huge suck out yesterday. A loose aggressive cut off opens and I 3-bet with AKs. We are both 150bb deep and he 4-bets to about $6. I expected to get almost his whole range to fold to a shove so that's what I did. However he snap calls with AA. The flop gives me just a back door flush draw which miraculously comes in by the river. Thinking about my play in the hand in general, it seems quite a risky strategy to 5-bet shove AKs for 150bb. But if he's only calling with {KK+} - probably a reasonable assumption then there are only 6 combos of those hands in total. I probably need about half of his range to fold to make a profit (a pure bluff would need 80% folds but when I'm called by KK+ I win 23% of the time) which means I need a further 6 combinations of hands to fold. This definitely seems reasonable. But perhaps flat calling preflop is better when we're this deep.

Oh well, for the time being I'll continue to donate to the 6-max games and blog some more about the experience at some point over the weekend. GL

3 comments:

  1. hey Simon, you are not right about your calcs for your AK v his range with your stack sizes. furthermore if you shove for 150bb you only ever are called by better

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  2. Hey, thanks for the comment. Would you be able to elaborate on your statement a little, is it the preflop 3-bet that you don't like with 150bb stack sizes?
    I think I see my maths mistake... I need around 70% (or more) of his range to fold for the shove to be better than a fold which is about 13 hand combinations. I think this is still possible, but perhaps less likely than I'd like to believe!
    As far as getting called by weaker, in this instance isn't the issue of value cutting irrelevant? Flatting the 4-bet seems bad so I need to decide whether turning my hand into a bluff by shoving is going to show positive EV. Please correct me if I'm wrong, perhaps I've been making some fundamental mistakes (more than likely).
    Regards, Simon

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  3. I think I've just realised what you mean. The entire plan "3-bet AK intending to jam over a 4-bet" with 150bb stacks is bad strategy because there's only better hands in his calling range.

    In this instance though the 3-bet was initially for value because my opponent was calling some of the time that I did.

    Anyway, your post has given me food for thought so thanks again.

    ReplyDelete