Yesterday, I was Shit.

Back in the days when Wimbledon football club graced the top division of the English league the team would give a t-shirt to the worst player from the previous game to wear during training. It said something along the lines of this post's title. Well yesterday, that player was me. I intended to post hand histories but I need to get to bed so I will delay that - although I think it will be informative if I do post them.

A large portion of the session I played reasonably well but I made two big mistakes.
1/ Ran a large bluff against an unknown
2/ Called a large overbet on the river from a loose passive who had shown weakness throughout the hand.
In the first case, I picked up good equity on the turn so played a check raise (I stand by this play, with the equity I had bluffing should be fine against 90% villains) but then when I missed the river after opponent called I bet out again. I think this is too fancy without reads. After my opponent has shown the ability to call a bet verses a super strong line then it's unlikely that he'll fold the river. I could and should have saved a 50bb bet.
The second hand was even worse. A weak passive player called my EP raise in the BB then donked out with a min-bet on a low uncoordinated board. I had an over-pair with JJ so I raised for value and the villain called. The turn was a card of a higher rank than the board but not jacks and villain bet the minimum again. Like 0.25c into a $5 pot. This time, seeing the value getting a lot thinner I decided to try and get another bet in on the river. So it came a 3 and villain shoves for 3xpot. So often against this type of villain it's either a slow played hand or one that's got there with the dealt card and I made a mistake and called. Sure enough, the weak passive had rivered a set.

It's very easy to be results oriented when looking back over a session, but this is two mistakes in big pots. That made the difference between a 5ptbb/100 win-rate for the session and a -5ptbb/100 win-rate for the session. I believe that I have the knowledge to beat this limit but I will not realise that equity until I cut out the mistakes in the big pots. So I need to be less suspicious and less fancy. It's an easier game at this limit than I'm making it! GL

Goal Revisions, Back to Study

Hey, I have formally decided to switch my focus back to full ring rush cash games because I am not able to meet my volume criteria by focussing exclusively on the tournaments.

The graph for my last 40K hands shows that I am not doing particularly well at the $0.10/$0.25 limit, which means that I need to work on my game again. The good news is that the tournaments have boosted the bankroll by about a third and I am now comfortably 'rolled for that stake and can give it a proper go without being close to my nitty drop down threshold. So I can forget about the money and just focus on playing as well as I can.

My goal from an earlier post was 500,000 hands this year and for now I think I'll keep this figure. That's a miserly 10k hands per week playing goal which I should easily achieve despite full time working hours. In fact, I should probably target double that but for now I'll stick to ten and see how I get on.

I honestly believe these games are well beatable for a good hourly rate and I have seen solid evidence from a tight player that backs this up over a good sample at 100NL. I play around 12-13% of hands so I definitely qualify as a tight player. All I need to do is improve my post flop playing ability and the $ should flow. So, back to work and time to get my first session of the week done :) GL

One other thing, I'm going to start a new database for this years endeavours so future graph posts will likely not include the displayed portion.

More Tourneys, a Little Cash

Played a small amount of tourneys tonight and a few hands of cash too (25NL Rush Full Ring) finished doing OK. I think I'll continue to do this - play tourneys when I have a period of time to do so and then in the small periods when I can't just load up four tables of cash. Not much else to say to be honest, I will try and set a resolution from now on to stop posting so much results crap and make it a little more interesting. Following this post...

Back to Normality

Hours have finally returned so some sort of normality so will hopefully kick on with my MTT effort. Was hoping to play a few yesterday but the dog was very ill - to be honest I thought he was a goner but after getting medication he improved a lot, thankfully. Just played five tourneys but busted all out of the money spots. One tourney I was poised to double up into the top five chip positions with about 70 runners left with AA versus 55 on a dry rainbow board (no 5) but he hit the two outer on the river. Now that people have returned to work the volume on full tilt is not what it was so they are loading slower than I thought they would. But I still want to put my effort into these games so I'll just have to play as many as load up in my time span. Going to spend two to three hours tonight playing so will likely take a break until then to get some other things done. GL

Rush Tournaments

I just thought I'd post a few thoughts about these tournaments. I'm running crazily well in them at the moment. I know for sure there's a down-swing around the corner so I'm readying myself as we speak. But... I can highly highly recommend the $4 ROD tournaments; they are full of fish. How can so many players not get that playing half of your hands is a huge mistake?

I'd absolutely love to see the ROI of some good players who have played decent volume in these as I'm sure it would surprise a lot of people. They are different to normal MTTs so I would not be at all surprised if the difference between good and bad players is magnified by the Rush structure leading to better ROI than normal. Until sharkscope allows us to filter this format I guess I'll have to continue to speculate.

The playing field seems to reach around 350 a go at the moment and so prize money is very good at the final table for very little investment. Villains seem to bust very quickly too, it feels like I make the money a huge % of the time - although this is probably just the fact that I'm experiencing a heater.

Well the next few months will give me answers about the true value of these games. But I think they are very beatable, probably the best choice of game for micro stakes players in my humble opinion. It's as simple as playing like a nit early on and getting tons of chips from the big hands and then knowing the short stack maths well. Lastly remember to change the ink in your printer because when you're printing money this easily you don't want to run out! GL

First Big Cash of 2011

~$300 chop for second place in a $4 Rush on demand. Final table was terrible for me to be honest and I'm amazed I came out of it with such a big cash. The whole table was loose aggressive pretty much and I was totally card dead and had no re-shove fold equity a large percentage of the time. However just by sitting tight and waiting for the occasional spot to keep my stack alive I was able to climb a few spots when other players busted. When it got short handed I then stepped on the pedal and was able to get heads-up with stacks even. My opponent asked for a chop and I decided just to take it at 50/50. In retrospect I wonder if I should have played on as I think I had an edge, but he wasn't terrible and I was getting tired so it could have been the best decision in the end. So, 2011 starts on a good note. I hope it continues! :) GL

Update on 2011 goals

I think that I'm going to follow the tournament route for the immediate future and maybe revise this after a month or two. At some point I will return to cash to improve my post flop play and hopefully become profitable in games up to 100NL but I think that I could potentially earn a lot of money from micro tournaments providing I can put in the volume. To this end I'm going to begin four tabling from now on, focusing on the $4 and $11 Rush on demand tournaments. My DB tells me that my average tourney time is about 35 minutes so four tabling should get me through eight per hour on average. So putting aside a couple of hours per day to play should get me to my target of 500 games per month.
The disadvantage of four tabling is the decision making which I discussed earlier. The only way I'm going to be able to combat this weakness is by working on my game and reviewing sessions. So I need to improve my knowledge as I go along. Here goes!