January Results

So, while I fell short of my original goal of my goal of $5k in profits for the month, I had a somewhat successful month of poker, covering my bills and leaving me with a bit leftover.

NL100: 39,712 hands for $2454.50 profit, a winrate of 3.09PTBB/100
NL200: 3,241 hands for $414.80 profit, a winrate of 3.20PTBB/100
Total: 42,953 hands for $2869.30 profit, a winrate of 3.10PTBB/100

Combined with about $200 in tournament winnings, I broke just north of $3k, not bad at all considering my extremely lackluster start to the month.

I attribute some of my results at the start of the month to bad play, on account of my being pretty sick, my being very tired (and thus playing a few sessions I should not have) and bad luck (at one point I was running around -$650 in all-in expectation, although I finished the month at +$60, which is damn near breakeven).

I can tell now that NL200 is quite beatable and I hope to attack it with a vengeance. No plans to move up any higher for the time being, as I know that NL200 is a level where I can quite certainly make a comfortable living.

3k hands of NL200

So, I decided, why not? I had the roll for NL200 (in fact I had more than enough, as my roll is now over 5k) and I decided to give it a go. Here's what it's looked like so far.



Quite a few coolers in there as well, including JJ vs QK on a 9TJ board (all-in on flop, I reraised preflop, donkey opponent cold-called twice and flopped the nuts) and A5 vs 56 on a 55xx6 board (valuetown on flop and turn, bet on river with a crying call of his small all-in raise).

I did deliver one whopper, facing an UTG min-raise, the button called, and I called from the BB with 3h 5h. The flop came A26 rainbow, and it went check/check/check. I turned my 4, bet, was instaraised big by the original preflop raiser, and realized pretty quickly that I was probably up against AA. I shoved, instacall, sure enough, there's AA. The river was a harmless 9 and I won a $400+ pot.

I can't blame the guy for the check on the flop, but the min-raise preflop was just stupid. People need to stop worrying about "only" buying the blinds when they pick up AA, particularly from EP. You're maximizing the odds that you'll be facing a set of hands that you REALLY don't want to face with your one pair, and you'll be facing them from OOP in many cases. AA is only the nuts preflop.

Anyway, I'm encouraged by the number of idiots I still run into at the NL200 level. How they manage to play this high I have no idea, but there are still the usual 45/5's that just get carved to pieces. The regs are better and there's more floating, stealing, semibluffing, and adjusting in general, but my standard game still feels like it's working. The first 3k hands have shown a decent winrate, and I have no reason to believe that something similar to that isn't sustainable.

Poker!

Monday, I wasn't really feeling it and quickly dropped a buyin with QQ in a spot I should have totally gotten away from. I played enough to get my 200 FPP points at Full Tilt (for Iron Man status for the month) and spent the rest of the day playing Forza 2, Rock Band, and Guitar Hero 3 (incidentally scoring top 10 scores on a few Rock Band songs, expert guitar).

Tuesday I decided to take the day off, and spent it playing video games and watching movies. I caught up on a few movies I'd wanted to see (Harry Potter 5, Superbad, Mean Girls, Waitress) and went to bed early, getting like 12 hours of sleep (seriously).

Wednesday I attacked in full force, playing just over 3k hands of NL100 and scoring over $600 in profit (woohoo!). I then decided to make an impromptu run to Best Buy, picking up Call of Duty 4 and the Superbad DVD (because the movie was funny enough to buy the next day). Spent the rest of the night playing CoD4 and getting nearly all the way through it. Holy hell is that AC-130 mission so much fucking fun.

Today I wasn't planning on a big poker day, but fired up the tables and just kept playing, until the next thing I noticed it was 6 hours and 3000 hands later. I did okay, running down for most of the day before going on a nice rush 2,000 hands in. I finished the day up $250, losing $50 on my final hand of the day.

Here's my graph for the week.


Incidentally, ever since Dobieatwar put a "hex" on me last Monday, I've been running at 5.14PTBB/100 and am about $2k up. Dobie has also apparently been running pretty poorly. Thanks dobie! Karma's a bitch, n'est-ce que pas?

Good Friday

Finally had my first really great day of the month today. Wound up +$480, and was up $580 at one point late. As usual, I started the day dropping almost a buy-in in the hole but quickly found my groove. The tables were fishy and I was running well.

Some of my more fun hands:

Not a good place to call an all-in with AK, methinks. Ouch. I was not happy at all when my KK got 2 cold-callers, but then the SB bails me out with a reraise. He called my push so fast I was sure I was going to run into AA. No such bad luck, although I did have to sweat a diamond on the river.

A nerve-racking hand here, but it paid off. Phew. What convinced me most to push my weak hand here was that the raise was so big. This particular player I'd seen slow-play in some marginal situations, and decided that a move that fast was either some kind of draw, a chop, or exactly what he turned out to have. When he snap-called I was sure I blundered my way into a set, and was very surprised to see his poor holding. What a terrible call of my push!

I don't understand people. Why call off your whole stack with second pair in this spot? What do you think you're beating here? JJ?

Totally sick river value bet. I was totally convinced I was up against 99 or TT this hand. And hot damn!

God I love Friday nights. Let's see. Pure aggression every step of the way from a tight player. Yeah, it makes sense to stack off with K8 on an 8-high board here!

Why you never, ever, ever min-reraise with AA.

He said "nice catch fish" after the hand. I responded, "What, one of my 13 outs?" Nice little coinflip win.

Pretty sick call on the river. I put him on QT exactly.

Here's my MTD graph. Finally starting to make a little progress. I haven't given up on my goals for the month yet, although I've got a lot of ground to make up and not a great deal of time in which to do it.

An astounding stat

In my run so far at NL100 (some 25k hands), 5 of my top 15 (and 3 of my top 6) biggest losing hands were hands where I actually had positive equity.

In contrast, only 2 of my top 81 biggest winning hands (and only 1 of my top 51) were hands where I actually had negative equity.

Give a brotha a suckout every once in a while man!

Can't complain too much, though. Had a good day today where I wound up +$200 over some 2,000 hands.

Past 4 days

Bit of a bumpy, frustrating road for the past few days, but I've managed to remain in the black for the time being. I've run about -$250 off my EV during that time period, though, with a spectacularly poor day yesterday, so I'm confident that I'm still playing well. Today I played about 2,600 hands and made about $180, although a lot of that was on delivering some serious coolers (set vs. underset something like 3 times today). Overall my run at NL100 has been 23k hands where I'm -$470 off my EV and still running at +1.9PTBB/100. Halfway through the month and not only am I not on target to meet my goals for the month, I'm not even on pace to match last month, even though this whole month will be spent at NL100 (barring a SERIOUS run and a shot or two at NL200) whereas last month started at NL25. However, the second half of last month was much better than the second half of this one, which would bode much better for me if I were superstitious.

Speaking of which, this jackass has put a "hex" on me for tommorrow so that I will lose big. I was heckling him today about his whining and general superstitious demeanor (note the post where he confidently asserts that Full Tilt is rigged), and more than anything his tendency to tap on the aquarium. He was shortstacking at like 5 of my tables today and seemed to be winning (he took me for $20 in a coinflip, his QQ vs my AK, AIPF). Not a horrible player (although he has some serious leaks) but someone I'm always glad to see fail. It's fun taking money off of despicable people.

I love it when hands just work themselves out:

Full Tilt No-Limit Hold'em, $1 BB (8 handed) Full Tilt Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: HTML)



MP2 ($96.85)

CO ($106.95)

Hero ($139.50)

SB ($28.70)

BB ($93.05)

UTG ($189.60)

UTG+1 ($27.05)

MP1 ($97.50)



Preflop: Hero is Button with 8d, 7d.

4 folds, Button raises to $4, 1 fold, BB calls $3. <---pretty standard button steal with a suited connector, and the big blind elects to smooth-call with aces.



Flop: ($8.50) Td, 6s, 3s (3 players)

BB checks, Hero checks. <---- With the board fairly unassuming, the BB maybe goes for a c/r on my expected c-bet (or, given the turn action, a slow-played c/c). I don't know exactly why I didn't throw that c-bet out there; there wasn't much I could represent, and didn't feel it had a good chance of being successful, and since I flopped the inside straight draw I decided to give myself a chance to hit it.



Turn: ($8.50) 9d (3 players)

BB checks, Button bets $6, BB calls $6. <---- Wham. The straight hits, also giving me a flush draw I don't particularly want or need. The BB gets overly cute here with a c/c, treating his aces as invincible.



River: ($20.50) Ah (3 players)

BB bets $14, Button raises to $40, BB raises to $80, Button raises to $132, BB calls $17.05 (All-In). <---- For the bb, things progress from bad to worse, as he catches the worst possible card in the deck. My hand is well disguised, and I'm not entirely sure the bb even sees that there's a straight out there. He's played the hand poorly to this point, but nobody can blame him for getting it in here.



Final Pot: $249.55



Results in white below:

BB doesn't show.

MP1 doesn't show.

Hero has 8d 7d (straight, ten high).

Outcome: Hero wins $249.55.

A bit of a roller coaster ride so far this week, with 3BI's lost Thursday and then gained again yesterday, but being back home, and sleeping again, should help immensely. Today is the iron man freeroll as well, and I hope to get in some 4,000 hands.

I would have played more yesterday, but I was playing Rock Band online and ran into a drummer who could play anything on Expert, who was thrilled to have a guitarist that could also play anything on expert. We were teamed up with a singer who was singing on Easy. It was quite comical. Later I found myself as leader with a good guitarist and drummer and for the 4th and final song of our set chose Green Grass and High Tides, whereupon we scored a disgusting 2.3M points.

The Friday night tables were not nearly as lucrative as normal, with all the drunks finding other things to do it seems. Oh well. Saturday afternoons are usually good as well, so I'd probably best get on to it.

Oh, and also, congratulations to Elky for his win in the Pokerstars Carribean Adventure! He's an ex-pro RTS gamer who made it big in the poker scene, and that tournament was one of the largest in history (I think the largest with a $10k buyin outside of the WSOP ME). First place netted him a cool $2M. TillerMaN already has a challenge on his blog for Starcraft 2, $5k a game :)

Whee! Variance!

I've just followed one of my worst days at cash game poker with one of my best, losing $250 or so on Friday night and following it up with a $420 win today. Last night was largely semi-tilting; I don't think my play was horrible but there were definitely a few questionable spots and my radar was usually way off. I was somewhat sleep-deprived and had no real business playing.

Today was the polar opposite. Fish spewing left and right, and I was always ready to pick up the slop. Quite a few hands where I felt like a Jedi. Poker is definitely an up-and-down game, but I feel like I'm actually getting the hang of the new level and see how it is hugely beatable.

So, about that other shoe dropping

I hate it when I'm right.



The most recent hand with the big drop was:

I fought the Krablar, and the Krablar won

I can't be too disappointed with that one, as I got my money in very good, though I can't believe the guy called my shove with nothing but the flush draw there. I suppose he must have thought his straight outs, maybe even his overcard outs, were live. I called the preflop reraise because it was a minraise, because I figured the guy was reraising weak (obviously he was) as I had been raping his blinds all night long, and because when I hit, as I did here, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. I'd have much rather he had aces :)

I've lost like $300 between my last two sessions, and am still running +5PTBB/100 for the level.

Happy New Year!

About 500 hands tonight, just a cooldown after my brother and sister-in-law went to bed. Up again, over 2 buyins. Still running at 20PTBB/100 for the level, now over 1,600 hands in :) The other shoe is bound to drop, but I hope it falls nice and slow in a transition to something like 6PTBB/100 :)

My goal for the month is $5k in total profits, and if I can hit it, probably $2k of that will be withdrawn, and I can pay all of my bills with poker for the first month ever :)