Friday, January 26, 2007

Quick Update

I thought I make a quick post since I haven't in a while. I'm doing so well live it's scary. This week I only played about 15 hours and am up about 110 BB's. I'll be going out to Vegas in June and maybe July so hopefully I'll have a comfortable bankroll to play the higher limits by then.

I'm convinced if Florida were to open up its gambling (instead of the $2 max law), it would be the most profitable place in the country (and therefore the world) to play poker. Florida would be a vacation meca: Beautiful beaches, great fishing, theme and amusement parks, great weather, and real casinos. Tons of tourists. Lots of rednecks. It's already full of retirees, many of which love to gamble in their spare time and don't mind losing...a lot. The last governor, Jeb Bush, is out of office and he was holding it back. With the new governor, there is a chance in a few years the state might open up. Trump, who owns the Taj, and Dan Harrington both bought a lot of land near Tampa recently so they might be thinking the same thing. The biggest hurdle is probably the fact that Florida is in the Bible Belt. We'll see what happens, but if it does opens up, it will be a poker utopia.

Anyways, if you haven't seen Poker After Dark then you should. It's a whole lot of table talk from the players and there are lots of interesting stories and even some strategy and tips to pick up. You can find the episodes on NBC.com. At least NBC is smart enough regarding YouTube that their stance is the whole "If you can't beat'em, join'em" thing. NBC puts almost all of their shows up on their site now. Thank you YouTube for so many things.

Also, The Circuit is a radio show at CardPlayer.com that does a lot of coverage during the big tournaments that you'll be watching on tv in the future. Every show has a guest Pro from the tournament like Matusow, Negreanu, Hellmuth and there is usually some nice tourney strategy that you can pick up. They're not exactly giving away their entire strategy, but sometimes they'll go over hands and how and why they played them a certain way. Good stuff.

There's really nothing else interesting to mention right now. Maybe I can make it 500 BB's by the end of month. I'm about 150 BB's shy, so I have some work to do.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

PokerBrat

Just another one of Phil's blow-ups:



This show is amazing by the way.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

The Poker Gods Have Been Good To Me

Thursday night I started out really strong after winning about 20-25BB's or $40-50 in the first 15 minutes of sitting down. I was dealt pocket Aces and raised it up with several callers as usual. The flop came J3J (rainbow I think, either way the chance of a flush had no impact on this hand). This wasn't a great flop for my hand to say the least. I was in late position and a player from early position raises. Everyone calls all the way around to a new player two seats to my right. He re-raised. I didn't know how he played as I had just sat down and had never seen him before. For some reason, I got a semi-tight vibe from him, and I'm not sure how to explain that. That re-raise really bothered me because the 3rd jack puts me in bad shape so I tried to see if there were any other clues to just how strong his hand was. Typical players give off lots of big tells that you will eventually pick up on. One common one that I've noticed lately is when someone raises and then looks off elsewhere as if not interested in the hand, then they're usually holding a huge hand. On the flipside, if someone raises and stares around the table at the action going on, they usually have a good hand but it's easily cracked and they are concerned that someone might beat them. There are all kinds of little helpful things like that you can pick up.

So I looked over at this guy and he was looking directly at the flop and as I moved down to his chips I noticed something BIG. His hands were visibly shaking. I almost felt a little sorry for him in that moment because I know what that awkward, nervous feeling is like. Nope, he didn't have trips. He'd need a bigger hand than that to make his hands shake. He had a real monster. Full House or quads, no doubt about it. I put him on the full house since it was far more likely than quads which is hard to ever put somebody on. I had two outs, the remaining two Aces which requires about 14 and a half or so to call. The pot wasn't quite that big, but as I looked around the table I could tell there would be several callers and that would bring the pot odds to just about right (along with implied odds) to call. I just had to hope the first raiser didn't re-raise. It was a borderline decision due to the break even odds and not all that profitable even if it did work out. This is were a little bit of No Limit thought came in and I realized that if I catch my 2 outs I could win a BIG pot off of this guy and whoever else got trapped in between our hands. I called and then called another raise on the turn when the Ace didn't come. The pot was close to $40 (20BB's) at this point. The most beautiful Ace that I've ever seen fell on the river and I stole the pot away from him after he flopped a full house with his pocket 3's. "Nice hand" in a sincere tone was his only comment as he took the beat like a gentleman. I've got a lot of respect for that. Little did I know, I'd have my chance to do that same thing at the end of the night in an almost identical hand where, this time, I was the one that flopped a set with KK, turned a full house, and lost to a lone Ace on the river against pocket Aces, the two-out rivered full house in a massive pot.

Those are real heart breakers.

Monday, January 08, 2007

This Week's Grind

Man, poker is fun! That's all I got for today.


















Ok, so that's not all. Well to begin, I've been doing really well on the home front. I've been playing a lot more and this week I'll probably be there playing live 3 days. Last Thursday I was up like 25BB's in under an hour, but that managed to dwindle down to about 12 by the end of the night. I'm not sure if it was just because I was missing draws, getting drawn out on, or just donking my chips off. On Friday, I'm certain I donked off more than I should. I was getting drawn out on alot, but could have saved an extra 5-10BB's by the end of the night by just playing better poker. You should never just write off losing a few extra bets you didn't have to. On that night, I was way down, like 20BB's, after the combination of losing some huge pots with big hands and donking the rest off. I finally won a good pot when I limped in with 66 and saw a flop off 644. There were a lot of young NL players at the table. They usually bust out of the tourneys and play limit afterwards. However, they aren't very good at NL either and tend to try to bluff alot in limit and make lots of loose calls. I decided to slowplay (something I rarely do here) and got a raiser to my right. I put him on a 4 pretty quick and that's what I was hoping someone held. I started to raise to push out players because I was so paranoid after having been drawn out in this manner all night, but buckled down and just called. There were 4 more callers. The turn brought a 2nd heart and I bet hoping the guy to my right would raise and I might trap the table for another bet. He did just that and the pot was now big enough that I could knock out players and re-raised. We ended up capping it with me and the two NL players remaining. The river brought a flush to anyone with 2 hearts. The other player left woke up and raised, representing the flush, and we ended up capping off 5th street. The pot was like 33BB's, $66 or so. My boat beat the Ace high flush and the trip fours to take a big pot and put me back to even. Nothing major happened for the next hour and a half and I left $4 down and mad at myself for donking off those extra bets that could have turned a losing session into a winning one.

On the net, I got really bored playing the .10/.20 tables and moved up to .25/.50 and have been very happy with that move. I've almost doubled my 50 buy-in in just a couple sessions. People tend to play tight enough that a raise pre-flop will knock out about half the table but loose enough that they will pay off big hands. Bluffing is also a tool again and can be used to great effect at times. I already want to move to .50/1 since I've had big winning sessions, but I'll wait here and pad my bankroll a little bit and make sure it wasn't just luck. Eventually, I'll reach a level that is above my skill in limit and I'll be happy to have that extra cushion until I get better. I hope to be at 5/10 by the end of the year.

I'm playing a bit of NL as well now. Playing limit online feels too much like a job. I just played in two NL sit-n-gos. In the first, I played my style and quickly doubled up to be a big chip leader. However, I naturally discover a way to screw that up. I had AQs and decided to raise on the button. I put in 75 and totally leave the 0 in the little bet box and bet 750. I'm called by a couple people. I flop the nut draw and am pretty much pot committed to continue, never getting there and losing about half of my stack. I told myself not to tilt and forget about it, but I think I did anyways cause I went out too soon.

I rebounded by entering another NL sit-n-go and got off to the same start, a quick double up. This time I made sure not to type in the wrong amount and knocked out about 3 more players until eventually knocking out 2nd place to take it. That was a little vindication for such a huge blunder.

There's a story about Phil Ivey involved in a similar situation. He was playing against Brian Townsend at 200/400 NL heads up. Townsend meant to type in something like $3,800 but ended up entering $38,000. Phil read it as a mis-click and moved all-in hoping to pick up the dead money. Townsend was pissed at his error but called with the rest of the stack. He flipped up A8 to Ivey's K9 and flopped 878 to take the $160,000 or so pot. Ivey promptly launched the monitor out of a nearby window.

At least that's what I would think he did.

I mentioned last week about posting a blog on how to improve your NL game drastically at these lowest of limits where you're playing a lot of people that watch poker on tv and think they know how to play or the overaggressive internet players. I haven't posted yet because I wanted to have the time to post a good blog, but I think you'll definitely want to catch it. I owe the ease of my recent NL success to it and all my strategy in these games falls under this one general realization. It won't help you against people that really can play well, but it just dominates the scrubs. It's great in tourneys and cash games and I hope to have it up as soon as I'm inspired to sit down for about an hour and type it up. Hopefully, this week.

That's all,
Dan

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Dutch Boyd's Comment

Duplicate Poker

Duplicate Poker from e-PokerUSA is a new form of poker I came across that was a bit interesting. The basic idea is that each table in a tournament or ring game is dealt the exact same cards. For instance, if I have AA, each person sitting in my seat at the other tables also have AA.

The goal is to play the hand better than the others either by gaining the most chips or losing the least. There is a point system that gives you points or deducts points from your score accordingly at the end of each hand and can range from no points gained/lost if you all came away with equal stacks to a huge gain or loss if you have substantially more or less chips than the other. Your score is carried from hand to hand but your chips are replenished each hand. For instance, in the hand above, I made a big laydown while the other 2 players with my hand ended up with all their chips in the middle and lost. Even though I folded, I was rewarded with a boost to my score for ending the hand with the most chips.

The whole idea is that if you play better than the other players, even if you're card dead or cold decked and it would normally be a losing session, you come out as the winner because you played the same hands better than they did. If you got a terrible run of cards in a normal game and lost $100 but played excellently, you'd still be considered a loser for that session. Duplicate Poker remedies this by showing, even though you lost, the other players lost even more due to their poor play and awards you as the winner through it's points system for good play.

I sat down today and checked out the software and played in a 50-man play money tourney to see how the whole thing works. First off, the software isn't where it needs to be. You can't maximize the screen just like Full Tilt and that's a nuissance. The layout is also fairly plain.



However, the worst thing about it is the time it takes to play a hand. Every table competing against each other has to wait for everyone to finish before the next street. That is, you close the action preflop and you wait....every table finishes and the flop comes....the action is closed and you wait...everyone finishes and the turn comes....etc etc. This is a quite annoying when everyone folds to 1 person but you still have to wait the 2 minutes or whatever for all tables to finish. It's not a flaw in the software, just a annoyance that is intrinsic to the game.

I played as I normally would in a tourney and managed to stay in the top ten most of the time. I questioned how it just much skill it rewarded at times when I would fold a hand like 83o against a raise, only to see two pair or trips come up that would have been made and actually lose points because one guy with 83o called the pre-flop raise and stayed in to win it. I assumed it would even out over time as it did. The thing that did bother me was that, even though we all share the same hands, we don't share the same opponents. What if one table is passive and a player with 78 suited gets to see the flop cheaply and make a flush sometimes, but another player with 78 at a different table has a hard time because everyone is raising and re-raising? The player that makes the flush would take a chunk of chips from the other, even though calling a huge raise was clearly wrong. This wouldn't be a good comparison in skill.

I think that it's a novel idea that is, perhaps, before its time. One day, someone may create a more polished game of poker that is purely skill, but we just aren't quite there yet. Even so, it's a nice take on the game we love and I'd suggest trying it out at least once. Just go to e-PokerUSA.

As far as the tournament, on the second to last hand I held AKo and made a very small raise of about 2 1/2x the big blind, something I often do with AK pre-flop when the blinds aren't high. The flop was very bad for me and I folded out quickly. My neighbors with the AK managed to get it all in preflop and lost in spectacular fashion. I gained a huge amount of points (victory chips) and went on to finish 3rd. The best part of the experience was they awarded real money in a play money tourney, albeit was only $1.25

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Bad Beat Story of the Day

Sigh. So I was sitting pretty deep in a 45 man tourney in 2nd place with about 3x the average chip stack. I see the flop cheaply with 66. Flop brings 5A6 rainbow bringing a set for me. 1st position, a big stack, moves all in and I quickly call figuring him for overplaying the top pair or maybe having two pair. He shows A4o, top pair weak kicker. I'm way ahead. He needs runner runner to win and I'm like 19-1 to be a big chip leader. He hits the runner runner with a quick Ace on the turn and 4 on the river and I'm crippled and out a couple hands later.

He doesn't even call the next day.

That's poker.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Something to Listen To

I just recently came across Pandora. It's basically internet radio but you begin by typing in a band that you like. Pandora will stream songs to you from that band and others similar to it that you may not have ever heard before. I've been using it all the time while playing to hear some new stuff and escape the monotony of the same mainstream songs over and over. It's very enjoyable; check it out.