Worried about volume so...

Back to Rush, but I'd still like to play a few hundred of these KO tourneys so I think I'll begin to five or six table (four Rush plus one or two KO). If that's too much I'll drop to 3 Rush tables. I'll still be playing plenty of hands. Not much more to say but this week has been busy and I've hardly had any time for poker but I'd like to try and get through 20000 hands this week. Will post results at the end! GL

Determination

I've played a few more without much more luck, but I'm really determined to learn how to play these games well (MTTs). Unfortunately it really feels that all the cash experience I've recently gained is fairly useless now. In the last tournament with about five fish marked at the first table I raised AA to 500 chips at 25/50 blinds (yes you read that right) with an eff stack of around 3000. 3 players called. One of them donk shoved as an overbet, and I called to see an eight out draw. Now, I think the call is correct giving all the garbage these players do this kind of thing with but in my full ring cash hands raising to 10 big blinds would be utterly ridiculous strategy most of the time. So in other words, I'm pretty much learning these games from scratch. The good news is that I have a decent knowledge about poker, so hopefully as long as I try and make the best chip EV plays and I'm right often enough, and I begin to improve my ICM on the bubble I will see a profit. I'll be using the 'position' tab in poker tracker as my main indicator of how I'm getting on, and the good news so far is that I've only clocked around 1100 hands in these tournaments and of course coming from grinding cash I'm well aware that I can get no indication of profitability from that few. As for the title of the post, I'm determined to be a winner at these now. I proved myself at 10NL cash and now I want to prove myself at $10 and under MTTs. GL!

First Final Table for $27

So I finished a final table for $27, the first cash that I've had so far. I made a significant mistake today though and cost myself some equity by reshoving with 22 versus a player who wasn't raising a wide enough range to justify the move and it cost me one buy-in. I've no idea how I'm going to fare in these games - well hopefully given the terrible opposition - but making mistakes like these makes me no better than them. Anyway, general notes on these games:
1/ Villains put way too much emphasis on the KO money, and consequently call very widely. There's not much we can do about this other than play very tightly and just try and steal pots where we can and value bet the hell out of our big hands. Standard preflop raise sizing is useless, with our big hands we need to be raising to a size that allows us to get the money in with two streets of betting post flop. The reason being that the fish will stack off with a lot of junk and draws. We miss value by allowing them to fold those busted draws on the river. So if the pfr is 8xbb or something then that's a good size. The villains still call!! Set mining is very good, but I've yet to work out how much we can risk for it to still be profitable. I suspect somewhere around 200 chips (with 3000 chip effective stacks) but I'll let you know if I discover any more on this.
2/ So we want to be a NIT during the early phase of the game. However, when antes come in the pot becomes very bloated preflop. I found that I was able to steal a lot more aggressively without anyone really figuring out that I'd switched gears.
3/ On the final table there seemed to be tons of chips flying about, so I think that nitting up again to move up spots is a decent strategy, but we must stay competitive and not let our stack dwindle away to nothing since we want to maintain a decent chance of winning.
Right, well I've played 8 so far at -$17.00.

First few games...

Didn't go well, I won maybe $3 in knockout money but didn't final table at all. But I am not disheartened, I'm very excited about these tournaments. The play must be as bad as I've ever seen since I've played poker! I'll need to do some work with sngwiz on shove fold spots as I'm very rusty in this area, but the villains are here to gamble. Last tournament I isolate shoved with AJs over a liberal stealer and the SB (a giant 50/33 whale) called with K4s to knock me out. This is just one example of tons and tons of terrible poker, and now I am beginning to think that these games are likely to be more profitable than Rush, despite it's benefits. Anyway, that's all my play for the evening. I just need to crunch some volume now and I'm utterly convinced that 50%+ ROI is easily achievable in these games. Which means that I could make a living playing $6.5 buy-in SNGs. That's just so sick it's unreal!!! If I get time I might post a few of the best (meaning funniest) hands after the first 20 or so games. It's great to be back in games where implied odds and value exist in abundance again! OK, four games down, 96 to go in the Debanks mini series. Let's hope I start winning some flips from now on!

Thinking of trying a different game for a while...

The last few weeks have gone great for me, I must admit. Confidence in my ability to beat micros (cash) has sky rocketed now. I've made around $800 (including rake back) over about 150k hands so I can mathematically say that it's almost certain I'm a winner there. It's only 10NL I know, but it's a start and $800 is good money in most people's eyes. But I watched an MTT video earlier where the instructor (MeatBuoy, FT) recommended the 90 man KO SNGs on Full Tilt. His ROI in these games is over 100% which suggests a very soft playing field. By my calculations this means that if I could just do half as well in those tournaments I could be making around the same hourly as I'm making at 10NL Rush but with a fraction of the investment. So I may try to play a bunch of these, maybe six at a time in the $6.50s where I could potentially be earning between $12 and $20 per hour. I think this would be more than my hourly at 25NL Rush and again - much less investment. The draw back would be the lost earnings from Iron Man medals and rake back along with the decrease in playing experience over time. I'd still like to get 1m hands Rush before next summer so this is likely to be a small foray into tournament play unless I do really well. Tell you what, I'll set myself a personal challenge:
To play 100 $6.50 90 man SNGs. If I make $300+ I'll move up to the $12+1 90 man SNGs and play a further 100 games there. If I don't, back to Rush! First session about to begin.

Improving (Again)

Just finished watching the Matthew Janda series on bet sizing (cardrunners.com) and have learned an awful lot from it. Not only have I fixed a few leaks, I've begun to realise just why we should be following bet sizing conventions; that is, we want to be able to get stacks in when we have a good hand. This is why in a single raised heads-up pot we need to be raising at some point after the flop in order to achieve this. So now my goal is to begin to work in all this knowledge to my game over the next few thousand hands. I must begin to raise a little more often in position both on the flop on wet boards and turn on dry boards. I also need to be check raising on both streets some percentage of the time too. This is so that I can get more value from big hands. The bottom line is that I've learned new concepts and have improved my knowledge of the game; things that will increase my win rate from now on. GL!

Making a distinction between winning and losing sessions

I've seen a gradual increase in my win rate over the 150k hands I've played at 10NL (Rush). There are a couple of reasons for this I believe. The first is experience; the more hands you play given some set of knowledge the better you become since you experience more examples of those concepts during play and the repetition of these situations allows you to improve the way you play in those situations. So I'm really excited about getting through hands now, and I don't really care any more how individual sessions go providing that my graph is still moving upwards and I'm getting through volume as this is making me a better player. The second reason for my increase in win rate is that I'm having more sessions playing my 'A' game compared to my 'B' game. I think the difference between the two is the times I sit down and just play my cards:
"Oh my pocket sixes missed again, I fold"
- and the times that I pay less attention to my cards and more on my opponents ranges:
"Well, villain is playing 11/10 with 3% 3-bet and has flatted me in late position. His flatting range includes middle pockets pretty dominantly. I have pocket sixes and although I'm turning my hand into a bluff I think that two barrels on this Kxx board will make the best hand fold very often so, I BET!"
- This example is really simple but it's thought processes like these that differentiate those times where I feel the best and the times I'd be better off doing something else. The good thing is that the good sessions are getting more frequent. It's probably a case of habit, the more I think on the second level the more natural it becomes. Hopefully by the time I've played a million hands it will have become second nature instead of something I have to really concentrate on doing.

PS I love the Mercury Music Awards, they've tuned me into so much good music over the years. Currently loving 'The XX' and 'Foals' albums.