Small vacation from poker

As the title says I decided to take a little time off poker. I'm stuck at -1BI at 50nl over 15k hands, and I feel to get a bit frustrated so a break should help. I already watched the new CR video from verneer and hookem which was great imo, and I plan on rewatching a few more 50nl vids from brystmar and read a lot in the forums. I used party's feature to self exclude myself from the tables. I very busy with my finals, so it should be +EV life wise too.

So far it works out good, I really need to get poker a bit out of my mind temporarely. As soon as I'm back at the tables, which should be in 2-3 days, I plan on playing only 4 tables for a couple of days to make a few adjustments to my game and also hopefully fix a few leaks. I'm still proud of the fact that I was able to play already 15k hands at 50nl and don't have to move back down and my goal for February will be to beat the new limit for sure thus I have to work hard on my game.

So far, thanks for reading,
Thomas

50nl continues

So I'm still playing 50 nl after 12k hands basically break even and I'm very happy with this. I have to say that there is definitely a difference between the play at 25nl and 50nl although most people tell you it there isnt. The players are more aggressive both pre and post flop and there is way more 3betting (at 25nl is no 3betting going on on most tables). So I had to adjust a bit to this and think I have done well with this.

While playing already 20k hands at 25nl this month, my stats were 16/13/3.5 over that time. Here comes a screen of today's nice session which should show the difference:

I loosened my button and CO opening and isolating range a bit to increase my att to steal. At 25nl this was around 24%, now I try to keep it over at least 30%. Until now this works out well, and luckily the money is still made post flop.

So I'm up only a bit over 2 BI's at 50nl for January, but made quite enough mistakes and also got coolered pretty hard lately and my main goal right now is making the transition to 50 nl completely and not crushing it already. Finally a few hands here from today:

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2000872
On the turn I check behind to let him value bet 99-AA on the river, luckily the river brings my pay off card.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2000884
Villain 3bet me pretty quickly and his range for this is 99+, AJ+, KQ+, so I 4bet him small to encourage him to shove with weaker holding, he does, I call and hold.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2000898
SB was hard lag, thinking but still stupid. I'm taking such big bluff lines, but it is so easy for me to represent here so many hands that have him beat.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2000906
I can't get away from this hand on the turn, as he shoves I think I'm beat by a set of 4s, turns out he floated and hit his 2 outer.

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2000916
AA is the last hand I expect him to hold here ...

http://www.pokerhand.org/?2000930
I'm not sure if I played this hand correctly, obviously I am up here against KK/AA 99% of the time.


I have a lot of work to do for finals this week, so I don't know if I'm able to put in too many hands. I'm already pretty happy with my January so far, hope I can make a few more bucks.

Thanks for reading,
Thomas

1st Update on 50nl and PT stats for January

So the day after my last nice 25nl session I took my first shot at 50nl. Unfortunately I'm currently very busy with college, so I have not been able to play too much since then only 4k hands.

The good news first, I'm still playing 50nl and my bankroll looks nice, but the bad news are I'm playing very bad. Thanks to poker gods for letting me run super lucky at 50nl to compensate my spewy play. I will start with a hands right from my first session, which I started by 4-tabling.


Don't ask me why, but every time I take a shot at 50nl I start with such stupid plays, I guess the cause for this is mainly that I am believing that I have to break trough the game.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?1982716
This hand shows how important it is to have a plan for the whole hand you're in. That is especially important when bluffing. In this hand I decide on the flop to c/r because villain was playing semi-lag and cbet 90% of his hands. In fact I am trying to represent a set, and I hope for a fold to take it down here. Once he calls my c/r the turn pairs the 6, now I try to represent a fh and lead big. He again takes just a second and calls. Now the problem is I was not looking at stacksizes or anything else, I just played the single streets. This leads to a river which changes nothing at the board, and leaves me with a <1/2> AA AI PF and a few similar hands, thus my pokerev graph looks pretty awesome. But also I also lost quite a few flips with combodraws and AK vs QQ/JJ/TT and vice versa AI PF but my showdown winnings are still way above the sklansky bucks. Below are my overall PT stats for January, pretty nice month so far and 2 very nice sessions at 25nl are missing cause they are on my desktop. Hopefully I can get 10k more hands in until February, but exams don't seem stopping. I'm also looking forward to sweat Bigslick (cr member) for a second time on Friday.



Initially I wanted to post at least 5 hands from 50nl, but post is already pretty long and I'm in a hurry now to go back to classes.

Thanks for reading,
Thomas

Done with 25nl!

Today morning I went home visiting my parents for personal reasons. On the afternoon I decided to sit down in the living room with my laptop (thx wifi) and play a bit poker. Played a short 20 minutes session, had to quit because I was too excited and did not think I was able to play my A game anymore. Man I should play more at my parents house. Ran sick hot, up 4 BIs over ~400 hands:


Big winners:
Suckout with KK vs AA when I runner-runner caught quads: http://www.pokerhand.org/?1963193

Set over two pair:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?1963198

Set owns top pair donk, river was a snap call obviously:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?1963198

TT vs AJ blind war, I like my play:
http://www.pokerhand.org/?1963221

So its the 19th of January and I already reached my bankroll goal of 1.5k. I'm very excited right now and will go out and have a good party tonight. I'm looking forward to start at 50nl tomorrow or Monday.

Thx for reading,
Thomas

Short distance towards my goal

My upswing doesn't seem stopping. Only played one more session in the last days where I went back to 12 tabling and did very well. Played a bit over 1k hands, and was down the whole time until the last 300 hands or so, where I stacked multiple villains on different tables for a nice overall profit:

So until now I played 18k hands into January for 5 ptBB/100. Current bankroll is $1460 so only 40 bucks more until my 50nl shot. Hopefully doomswitch doesn't decide to hit me so close to my goal. But honestly I don't see how I cannot reach this and I'm pretty proud of this. I'm currently thinking about the time I want to give myself for getting past 50nl, but maybe I should first move up succesfully before setting any new goals. Overall I want to be playing 200nl by the end of the year 2008.

I spent quite a few time posting in the forum the last days, and cannot play to much because I'm most of the time too tired and upset from busy real life stuff. This could also be the reason for me answering quite offensive to a few foum posts, but honestly it tilts me hard that nobody can follow the rules and read the faqs before posting hands. There are a few guys like me who are sitting around going trough all posts and trying to be as most helpful as possible, so off-topic, unrelated or bad structured posts make my job a hard one.

Got drunk pretty hard yesterday, so I look forward to maybe play a bit this night if I'm in the right mood.

Thanks for reading,
Thomas

Playing fewer tables

Today I spent a ton of time on working on a paper about SPKI (simple public key infrastructure) which I have to finish until Wednesday. In the breaks I went shopping and posted/read a bit in the cr forums. I'm really surprised how fast traffic there is increasing especially at micro stakes. Looks like a lot of newer players decided to learn a bit more over the game in the new year. Gonna be interesting if this will go back down again in a few months. Also it looks like many new people join the community because of Taylors protege announcement but anyways more traffic is fine for me.

Later I decided to play a bit poker, but wasn't in the mood for my standard 2 hours multi table madness. So I decided it could be funny and also good for my game to try to play only 4 tables. It's been quite a while since I was sitting down with this few tables and I was pretty excited about how I would perform.

I ran very hot. Wow poker with reads seems suddenly very easy. I think I took pretty solid lines. I made a few nice squeezes and did very good in the smallish spots which is also reflected by my stats:

My Won$WSF was very high which comes from me betting out from the blinds with a late position limper quite frequently. I think if I could do this a bit more while 12-tabling this would increase my winrate significately. Also I won most of the showdowns and agression factors are very high, but meh such a smallish sample size. Maybe I will continue one playing only 4 tables for a few days because this should help me identify a few leaks and also gets me prepared for moving up to 50nl at the end of the month cause want to start with 4 tables there. This also should make my winrate for the month look a lot better.

I also played a hand which I'm very unhappy with:

Party Poker, $0.10/$0.25 NL Hold'em Cash Game, 5 Players
LeggoPoker.com - Hand History Converter

Hero (CO): $24.90
BTN: $49.37
SB: $51.80
BB: $25.35
UTG: $50.74

Pre-Flop: Q Q dealt to Hero (CO)
UTG calls $0.25, Hero raises to $1.25, BTN calls $1.25, 3 folds

Flop: ($3.10) J T 5 (2 Players)
Hero bets $2.30, BTN calls $2.30

Turn: ($7.70) 5 (2 Players)
Hero bets $6, BTN calls $6

River: ($19.70) 8 (2 Players)
Hero checks, BTN checks

Results: $19.70 Pot ($0.98 Rake)
Hero showed Q Q (two pairs, Queens and Fives) and WON $18.72 (+$9.17 NET)
BTN mucked J K (two pairs, Jacks and Fives) and LOST (-$9.55 NET)

Button had decent taggish stats and was playing fairly aggro post flop. On flop and turn I bet pretty big both for value and for protection. I figured his cold calling range pre flop with the 2 calls on this board to be some big broadway cards or smaller sc's thatare calling with the draw. In that case there would be no value in betting the river cause every draw missed so I decided to check it to him and hoped for him bluffing the missed draw.

Instead he insta checked behind and mucked a passive played TPGK. I think against a somewhat thinking opponent it is a leak to hope for them bluffing the river. Also my turn bet was pretty big and I guess a naked draw would have folded. I guess I missed one street of big value here and this sucks. I don't think he would have folded to a shove.

So I will watch a bit tv now and then go to bed. Need get a lot of work done tomorrow and wanna visit the gym.

Thanks for reading
Thomas

Value of TAG stats

So I have played close to 4k hands since my last update. I'm still running pretty good, and also I think I'm playing good. What I'm pretty proud of currently is the ability to criticize my winning session, which can get really hard. I have lately started to copy hands that I struggle with immediately while playing because my usual session review consists of only watching the big hands. Session reviews can get time consuming when you are able to put in 1k hands per hour. But anyways, here are my stats for Thursday and Friday:



So I'm 200 away from reaching my January bankroll goal, and my move to 50nl. As I was playing on UB in November 2007, I tried to move up to 50nl with a bankroll under 1000$ multiple times. The experience I gained from this was that I'm very bad at playing under rolled. Everybody says that 50nl plays similar to 25nland from my experience/datamining thats true. But I tend to overplay certain situations when I don't have a big roll. I found the same thing when I moved up from 10nl to 25nl.

So this time I'm going with 30BIs to 50nl, will start by playing only 4 tables and move down to 25nl again if I lose more than 6 buy ins. But I don't think this is gonna happen. For the first 2-3 sessions I will do very detailed session reviews, look for adjustments needed for the new limit.

I'm also happy that I heard today from CR member Bigslick that he is progressing at 10nl. Its been a few days since I did s sweat session with him, where I tried to fix a few of his biggest leaks, and I would be pleased to continue with this. It's a very nice feeling to being able to help others, thats why I'm posting so much at the CR micro forums too, and I won't gonna stop this even while I move up to higher stakes.

There is currently a discussing going on the forums about tough competition at 25nl on FTP. A few guys were complaining about table selection being pretty hard and most tables being full of solid TAG players. This made me think a bit about pahud stats on villains, and how to play against those "solid" players. I came to a point that I think is pretty crucial to understand:

Everybody can take a hand chart that dictates how he has to play pre flop, when to raise and when to fold. Also you can start continuation betting every time you were the pre flop aggressor and either give up or value bet on turn depending on your hand.

With that said, you are a Level 1 thinking player that will show up in my hud as a solid TAG player. Your stats should easily look like 18/15/2 which most micro stakes players will interpret as good. But my no means you are a good player. In reality, these are the type of players you should be fine to play against. Pre flop you can steal from that in position a lot, if they are to your right you can defend your blinds against there steals by 3 betting very easy, and in position you can call their raises a lot with SCs and small PPs and either float them or take their whole stack when they go with TP all the way.

The best thing with all that is, they are not going to adjust to you, because that is what makes the difference between solid break even TAGs at 25nl, and those who are winning and moving up: Adjusting to your table and your opponents, and getting a Level 2 thinker.

Thanks for reading,
Thomas

No party, but a nice session

So I didn't go out tonight, mainly because I was too tired and lazy, haven't really slept the last 2-3 nights. Instead watched the new cardrunners video by sbrugby. Really awesome how he talks about how quickly he moved up trough stakes. Watching him really motivated me to play a bit more poker today, so I decided to fire up 12 tables and admit to play as long as I was focused.

I had played about 1k hands when I decided to stop because I was running so hot that I got scared of winners tilt. Here are my stats for today, already played a small 1/2 hour session after lunch:



Here a hand that shows how well I was running.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?1917069

I mean yea I sucked out on him a bit. But I don't mind getting it in on this turn with the flush draw. I still have 25% equity vs a J and I think he folds everything except a jack or 33 to my jam.

When you run good poker is so easy, most hands really played themselves. But also took pretty good decisions.

This hand might look a bit strange. In fact I snap called his limp-shove. This guy had limp-raised quite a few times, and was overall way to aggro. Feels really good to make plays read dependent while 12 tabling.
http://www.pokerhand.org/?1917148

So that should be it for today. Got a lot of work for studies tomorrow, mainly writing a paper and finishing few math things, but will hopefully be able to play at least 1k hands cause I have to hurry to reach my goal.

Started my "serious" poker blog

So I started a blog ...

I hope that blogging frequently will help both my poker skills, and my English language skills. Should be good to review my own hands, and brag about the beats to cool down after bad sessions. I'm also posting a lot in the cardrunners micro stakes forums, so hopefully a few guys from there are going to read this and comment here from time to time.

In the future my may post a bit of summary of my personality and my small poker career, but for now I'm just gonna say that my current game is 25nl at PartyPoker, and I'm ~400$ away from finally moving up to 50nl. This step up is my first goal for 2008, and is set to Frebuary 1st. So everybody wish me luck that I'm gonna reach this.

I guess this should be enough for now, gonna go party out this night. Next entry I'm gonna start posting a few stats and hands, and any other things that come to my mind.