Good Session; Three Leaks

Hey, just had a great session. It started poorly, it was one of those periods of play where villains just played back every hand. I was probably just running into hands. Normally though, this tilts me and I end up playing back when I shouldn't but tonight I was pretty disciplined. I didn't play really well but decently enough. Then all of a sudden I had a bit of a rush and won a couple of buy-ins including the following hand which I was very proud of:

Basically 150bb deep I hate the flop reraise. But the board was really dry and it didn't make a lot of sense for someone to raise a set on that board unless they think I get really sticky with the better pairs in my range. Given that I have top pair and therefore blockers to set combinations I decided to call and I was planning to blocker bet the turn and fold to a reraise on that street. When the turn paired the board though I became more confident with my hand. Now with only 5 set or quad combinations and very little draws I decided that I was probably good enough of the time to check call both the turn and river. Luckily it turned out this time :)

I think that there are three particular areas of my game that I can improve:
1/ C-betting too much on the turn. Over the last 15K hands the pattern has continued that opponents fold way too much on the flop but once they've called the flop, rarely give up on the turn. This is a sign that players only continue on the flop with a pretty strong range. Unfortunately I think that I barrel the turn too often. If my opponents rarely fold the turn after floating the flop then I really need to ONLY be betting for value on that street. I'm currently doing it more often than this.
2/ I don't think I raise c-bets enough. The vast majority of players at these limits c-bet most flops with their entire range. They don't look at texture, they just blast away blindly. So it stands to reason that raising c-bets should be insanely profitable.
3/ Defending my range. My fold to flop c-bet has come down from around 48% to 45% which is a good adjustment but I'd still prefer it to be a little nearer 40% so I need to find more places to defend my range. I've already mentioned raising c-bets but this includes flop calls.

Anyway, the work continues and I'm enjoying the game more than I ever did. GL!

Refocusing and Tonight's Play

Hi all. Recently I feel that my knowledge has expanded to a new level, but unfortunately I haven't really played enough to verify that this has actually improved my play or not. So to find out I'm not going to do any more learning for a while and just grind grind grind. Tonight I played a session of cash (10NL Rush) as well as a few of the 90 man KO tournaments. I really thought I played well despite finishing down. I was focused, and felt like I was playing game A. Just unfortunate that this didn't translate into winnings.
I'm about to set up a second monitor. When I play the tournaments I find 6 tabling to be very easy so I'd like to try and ten or twelve table and see how I get on. I need to maximise my volume to smooth out the very high variance. I've been looking at a few high volume MTT players on sharkscope and a 100 or so game downswing is pretty common so I'm not at all disheartened; if my current strategy can make me 2BB/100 in nitty full ring Rush I expect a similar strategy - and a good knowledge of push fold maths - will translate into bigger profit in micro (donk filled) MTTs.

Recently I've been working really hard on defending my range more so that I'm not such a fit or fold weak pushovertard. I've learned a lot from my study but tonight I went back to just concentrating very hard on refining my opponent's hand range and basing my play on that. There were plenty of spots where I was able to use my new found knowledge but I wasn't spending the whole time looking for excuses to play back. All of a sudden the good spots stood out while the rest of the time I could just play ABC. Only time will tell but I expect that playing in this vane will get me a good win rate in both of my current chosen games. Hopefully time and volume will verify this. GL!

Leaky Improvement?

Well I'm back in Rush and clearing the bonus and I'm noticing some improvements in my game. Firstly over the last 8k hands I've been break-even unfortunately and this is probably a result of not having played much Rush for a while. As a consequence (and to verify that adjustments in my game have not contributed more leaks than they've fixed) I intend to really grind for a while. Not just to clear bonus but to play a meaningful sample of hands again. After this I'll be able to objectively analyse my game and decide on the next step to higher stakes. I believe that I've improved my thought process during a hand. Instead of looking purely at my two cards I'm thinking about it as part of a range. This may not seem like much but it's leading me to play less weakly post flop. Occasionally it is tricky to balance the need to play strongly and not give villains too much value when they have the top of their range and this is possibly a leak I have created from beginning to play back more. However I'm now winning just over 49% of hands after seeing a flop and this is an excellent result. If I can keep this up then I'd expect my win rate to rise. Only volume will verify this of course.
AS for the tournaments I will continue to play them when I have a spare 3-4 hours. I ran deep a couple of times in the last session and this has clawed back some of my losses. Still a long way to go though, and I'm beginning to realise how much volume is needed in MTTs to actually get a realistic ROI: I'm guessing that you probably need hundreds of final table finishes. Still, I'm determined to regain some sharkscope dignity (lol) so I'll continue to play these games which seem so so soft.

90 man KOs. SERIOUS TILT CONTROL REQUIRED

FT Bonus

OK so FT just waved $50 at me so I'm going to have to play less tournaments and grind some Rush again in order to clear it by the 24th. I haven't actually played for a few days I think I needed a break as tourneys still going pretty badly. I think I probably need to adjust strategy somewhat and definitely burn through more volume but for now - back to a game that I can beat. I'll play mainly 10NL Rush and mix in a little 25NL occasionally for a laugh. As soon as the bonus is cleared I'll be back at the tourneys. Since I'll be playing a fair bit again unfortunately that means that I'll probably be blogging random crap. I'll prob pick a few hands and do detailed analysis on them and may even talk about them on here which could be fun as my fishiness is outed for the world to see. Ah well, until then GL!
EDIT: Well, it only took me 1200 hands (or a little over an hour) to clear the first $5. Easy money huh? Just play 12k hands they give you $50. It's a hit on the rakeback, sure, but it's a better deal so you should always take it. I found that I've loosened a little as my confidence has grown and I've found a lot more spots to float/raise lately since doing the hand analysis. Suddenly spots where I just folded before have started to look juicy for a raise even after studying only maybe 20 hands. So I shall continue with the study as it's obv making a big difference to my play.

Crossroads

I have reached a point in poker now where I'm coming across ideas that seem to contradict things that I've learned before. In the past I learned about pot odds. If we are not getting odds from the pot that our equity requires then we should fold. But recently the Janda video along with some more equity work I've undertaken has shown me that to be unexploitable, we need to defend with a range that often contains hands that do not conform to the pot odds axiom. In other words despite the pot odds we need to be playing a certain amount of our range regardless, even when the equity is insufficient for certain hands. This is causing me a lot of problems currently and may eventually stall my poker development. In particular I studied a couple of hands where each player's ranges were so weak on average by the turn that in order to defend against exploitation each opponent had to include some combinations of ace high in their calling ranges over two streets to showdown. I've seen videos of the great players and there's a recent Jungleman vid that has possibly the best hand I've ever seen played at poker. But during play I find it almost impossible to bring myself to make such thin calls. A lingering habit of my fit or fold days? Or a poker ceiling that I may never cross? Who knows, but the next few weeks may make or break me as a poker player. Just as I'm beginning to realise the true depth and beauty of poker I have also just realised that my eyes may never be good enough to truly appreciate it.

By the way, that link is seriously worth watching. My jaw never fails to hit the floor. Good luck Durrrr, because Jungleman can play. No shit!

Wow.

You know occasionally you stumble across something that's just so awesome you cannot believe it? While browsing the iPhone app store earlier I stumbled across a poker calculator that claimed to be like pokerstove. Well, it's better than stove, and I've used that program for years for equity calculations. PokerCruncher
So, for pennies you can have a program with you at all times to run equity calculations. Not only this but the software has a complete thread on twoplustwo where the developer - just one bloke - is taking suggestions and implementing them in free updates. So I paid two quid for a ridiculously high end poker app which should pay for itself in... uh... maybe a hand at 10NL? I'm not a member on twoplustwo so I cannot thank the author personally. But it's the steal of the century for any serious poker player, and very highly recommended. :)