wtf January

Started out super hot in January, finished up meh.

Cash results:
12,041 NL 10 hands
866 NL 25 hands
$228.6 profit
8.63 BB/100

Pretty good, except I'd like more volume in February. I had only 3 days with more than 1k hands, and my new years resolution basically had me doing 1.6k daily. So I've completely failed in that regard. Time for some will power.

Tournament results:
32 played
$324 in buy-ins
$1039 in cashes
220% ROI

This is pretty awesome, though I would have like to do better in the Sunday Million Special Edition I played today. I was basically scared money and played a bit too nitty, though I didn't have very many playable hands. Next time I play this I expect it to be much different (but that probably won't be for a good 3-4 months).

Managed to make Silverstar this month, just barely. Got a nice little $10 bonus for doing so. Now I need to focus, play lots more hands and move up to $25NL so I can get tons of FPPs while crushing souls.

BOOM!

2010 is off to a great start thanks to playing some tournaments on Saturday. I tend to not play well on weekends in cash games, so I decided that to get my requisite 16 table hours on weekend days I would rather focus on tournaments. I ended up winning a $1 6-max with 4900+ runners for $762, which also just so happens to be my largest career tourney score.

I also played 300 hands of 10NL and won like $1.50, so all in all it was a great start to the year. Unfortunately, I didn't complete my full hour of job searching, and I've done neither job searching nor poker today, so I owe 600 pushups and situps, which I think I'll do 200 per day until I'm strong enough to do the 300 (so far 100 is killing my wrists/elbows).

2009 Results

I'm going to look back at my goals for 2009 and compare them to how things actually turned out. Overall, things didn't go exactly as well as I'd hoped.

Tournament goal: 200+ tourneys, avg buyin > $5, ROI >90%.

I only met the first of these. Here are the results:

Tournaments played - 320 (though not all of these were MTT's, which the original goal assumed).
Average Buying - $3.96
ROI - 11.64
Total Profit - $147.56

lol donkaments. I have a much higher expected ROI than this, but I doubt it is as high as the 90% I put in my goal. I think I can sustain a 50-60% ROI in most low to mid tourneys.


Cash game goal: 40k hands, 9+ BB/100 winrate, reach NL25.

I didn't meet any of these, but I still felt some progress as a cash game player which I hope to translate to better results this year.

Total Hands - 30,319
NL10 Hands - 23,466
NL10 Winrate - 7.79 BB/100
NL25 Hands - 6,801
NL25 Winrate - (6.72) BB/100
Total Profit - $136.15

I now know that a 9 BB/100 winrate is basically unsustainable over a large sample size at any limit over 5NL. That was probably an unreasonable goal, and I am very happy with my winrate at 10NL, even if it is over a small sample.

I took a failed shot at NL25 in August, but I don't think I played as bad as the results indicate. I posted quite a number of the hands and the general consensus was that I was running pretty awful. I know that I wasn't playing great, but I think that in August my true winrate at NL25 was probably greater than zero. I have made a lot of progress since then, changing my game from a 16/13 nit to a ~21/18 tag, and I have more work to do. I took most of my roll off of Stars for some bills and to focus myself with a lower $ amount to work with. I'll start off the year at NL10, but I am hoping to move to NL25 soon and stay there.

As far as reaching my goals, 2009 sucked, but I think I set the bar a tad too high. The winrates I had set for myself were about what I had achieved in the past, but I realize now that I was both running hot and the games were softer back then. Such high goals are mostly unattainable with the games today. So in 2010 I hope to have more realistic goals that I can attain, and feel good about my progress as a player.

2010 Goals

I'm going to post my 2010 goals now, and my 2009 results in a few days, though I will say that 2009 was somewhat disappointing.

Goals for 2010:

1) Structure my daily routine.

- I will job-search for 60 minutes per day.
- I will play poker for at least 16 table-hours per day.

I will perform each of these tasks at least 6 days of every week. Every day that I do not finish either one of these tasks, I will do 300 situps and 300 pushups the following day, in addition to completing the above tasks.

I figure that with the above structure there will be 3 potential outcomes, all of which are very positive:

A) I will find a job and begin my engineering career.
B) I will get very good at poker.
C) I will get ripped.

Personally I would prefer the options in the order they are listed, but I don't think any of them are particularly bad options.


2) 400k hands of 6-max cash.

I'd like my winrate to be >3.5BB/100, but as I move up this may be unrealistic. I'd just like to play as well as I can, be profitable, and continuously get better.


3) Play the Sunday Million at least twice (or equivalent tournament, as I would gladly substitute a $215 SCOOP or WCOOP event for the Sunday Million).

I think this is definately doable, as I'll likely be able to play with fpps given my volume goal. I will also need to play the occasional smaller tournament just so I'm still in touch with my tournament game when the time comes to play said event, since 6-max cash is clearly very different than full ring tournament play.


4) Achieve and maintain, at a minimum, silverstar status.

I'd like to do this for a few reasons; the first being that I'll get an FPP bonus, and the second because Stars is giving some pretty sweet cash bonuses for VPP milestones, even for small-stakes or lower volume grinders.



I think that just about sums up my poker goals for 2010. I kept it a bit shorter this year, but it will be a lot more work than I'm letting on. For instance, for the 400k hands, I'll need to average better than 33k per month, and the best I've ever managed in a month is 12k. Worse, my second best is <7k. It will be a much longer grind than I'm used to, but I think I'm up to it.

Obviously if I find a job it could detract from goals 1 and 2, but I'd like to maintain a sufficient volume on nights and weekends to keep pace for 3 and 4 at least.

December

December was meh in terms of reaching goals. Ended up being pretty busy. Played around 2500 hands of NL10, and won at about 10.5BB/100. Good winrate but crappy volume, the story of my life. Oh well.

November

As I predicted, November got very busy with my senior design project. I was only able to play about 500 hands of cash. I also played about 25 tourneys, 20 turbo $3 SNGs, 4 11.7 DSO's to the sunday million, and 1 other random tourney. I did the tourney playing because I wanted to try and satellite into the $2.5M guaranteed Sunday Million that Stars put on to celebrate giving out $250M in that tourney through its life. They got 18k runners so it would have been really sick to play in, but I didn't win a seat. I pretty profitable in the SNGs though so it's all good I guess (about 115% ROI through the tourney's combined).

December is looking to be pretty busy again. I have some finals, need to finish laying the bricks in my yard, and am going to NH for Christmas. So I think I'll have around 15 days to play poker, if I can convince myself to actually sit down and do it. I need 12k cash hands to meet my goal for the year volume wise (40k), and I think I can do it. I'll need to focus, and not be lazy, but it's definately possible.

October/November

October was a meh poker month. Played about 3.5k hands and finished up around $55 online. Also went to Vegas at the end of the month and played about 3 hours of 1/2NL at the Mirage. Things didn't go that well and I finished down a buyin. I played a bit too tight, but I didn't run particularly well either. And for what it's worth, the rake was pretty severe at 10% as well.

I'll get back to work on my game online so that my next trip will be more successful.

School is still interrupting my pokering, but I also slacked off quite a bit in October. So I'm going to lower my goals in November in an attempt to actually reach them.

10k+ hands
4k+ hands at NL25
5BB/100 overall winrate
6 table at least 1/3 of the time

September

This may come as a shock, but I didn't meet my September goals. Crazy, I know.

My goals were essentially 20k total hands and move back to NL25.

I only managed to play 5.7k hands and also managed to fail in a second shot at NL25.

NL10 Stats:
3746 hands.
11.45 BB/100
+$85.8 ($8.5 per hour)

NL25 Stats:
1973 hands.
-2.79 BB/100
-$27.55 (-$4.98 per hour).

Pretty crappy. I was lazy. So I'm going to repeat those same goals this month. I am going to be a little busier with school stuff, but I want to be committed to my poker goals as well, so I am going to try very hard to put in volume.

This is lol bad

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, $0.25 BB (6 handed) - Poker-Stars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

saw flop | saw showdown

MP ($25)
Hero (CO) ($25.25)
Button ($12.70)
SB ($24.15)
BB ($51.40)
UTG ($25)

Preflop: Hero is CO with K, K
UTG bets $1, 1 fold, Hero raises to $3.50, 3 folds, UTG calls $2.50

Flop: ($7.35) 2, 2, A (2 players)
UTG checks, Hero checks

Turn: ($7.35) 5 (2 players)
UTG bets $3.80, Hero calls $3.80

River: ($14.95) J (2 players)
UTG bets $7.60, Hero calls $7.60

Total pot: $30.15 | Rake: $1.45

Results:
UTG had A, K (two pair, Aces and twos).
Hero mucked K, K (two pair, Kings and twos).
Outcome: UTG won $28.70

Meh, flop line is standard. Turn call is close, but for some reason I thought I had some implied odds. I obviously don't, because if a fourth heart comes out villain is shutting down unless he has Qh or a boat. There is some chance he's betting worse to fold out my fairly obvious TT+, so I don't completely hate the turn call even with small implied odds.

The river call, on the other hand, is lol bad. Villain is not betting again to try to get me off of TT+ like ever in this spot, I don't think. I somehow convinced myself he was bluffing, though that is clearly an unlikely possibility. I knew before I called that I shouldn't, and I did it anyway. That puts me at the same level as a standard donk. Good players make good decisions. I make good decisions usually, but I tilt too easily and make bad decisions when I have a hand that is extremely good preflop but is clearly not good post-flop.

A Tale of Two Limits

So August has come and gone, and for once I'm actually impressed with the progress my poker game has made. The results were poor overall, but I feel that my game has gotten significantly better throughout the month.

We'll start by looking at tournaments.

Number played: 56
Number of cashes: 9
Total Profit/(loss): (94.69)
ROI: (38.32)

Blah, run bad and I stopped caring at the middle of the month. Downswings in tournaments suck. I was playing very well in my opinion and just running bad at the wrong times.

So instead of playing tournaments in my newly acquired excess spare time, I started focusing more on cash games especially around mid-month. I had the highest volume month of my career in 6-max cash, which felt good. I actually moved up to NL25 for a fair bit, which is where the title of this post comes in. We'll start by looking at NL10 for the month.

Number of hands: 7,148
Profit/(loss): $163.15
BB/100: 11.41

I am very pleased with this result, and felt that my post flop game was doing very well this month. I still need work on my preflop game though, I'm just way too tight still. Opening up will make my long-term winrate better, and that is obviously a primary goal of mine.

With the positive out of the way, lets take a look at NL25.

Number of hands: 4,781
Profit/(loss): ($204.65)
BB/100: -8.56

Obviously my stint at NL25 didn't go as well as I'd hoped. I played just about the same as I do at NL10, but variance had it out for me, as the largest downswing I've ever encountered (8 BI) met me in my step up the limits. I've dissected many of the major hands pretty thoroughly, most with the help of 2p2, and the general concensus is that I've largely been running like shit. That said, I was displeased with some of my tilted play. I called down in a number of very poor spots. If I had played my A game throughout the downswing may have only been 6 BI. Oh well, it's over now, and it game me renewed vigor and focus.

The biggest area of concern in my game at the moment is my PF range. I have run 15-16/12-13 for as long as I can remember and that's simply way too nitty to be any good moving up. I will be making a concerted effort to get those numbers closer to 22/20 to 24/21. I have to work on post-flop as well, sure, but you don't get post-flop without having a sound pre-flop game, so it suits me to start there.

Also of note is that I made a pretty good run at getting silverstar status this month. I managed to collect over 900 of Pokerstars VIP Player Points where 1200 get's silverstar status (basically extra free stuff). I was collecting 2x FPP's all the time thanks to an online survey I filled out for Stars in July. So I was able to get a new book from the VIP store and still have nearly 2k FPPs for future use.

I'll be moving back to NL25 sometime in September. Since I lost ~200 dollars there, I'm planning on making that back in NL10 before trying again. So far I've knocked out about 70 in 2k hands since moving back down. I've been table selecting very well of late, it seems every table I'm on has at least one, usually two or more 40+/<5s. It's fantastic.

Goals for September:
20k hands of 6-max.
8+ BB/100 at NL10
6+ BB/100 at NL25
Reach Silverstar Status

Notably there are no tournament goals this month. I'm basically fed up with them. Sure I'll play them again, but hopefully not until I buy into them with FPPs. : )
The Sunday Million costs 13,500 fpps, and that very well may be my next tournament, unless I play a few to warm up for it.

A Bad River Call

I haven't been posting enough humiliating hands in this blog. That was one of the blog's original purposes, so I will rectify that now. In the following hand I make a pretty terrible river call.

Villain in this hand is at 3 of my tables, and is running 17/12 IIRC. Seems pretty solid. About 3 orbits prior to this hand he lost a buyin when his 44 lost to AQ on a A42A board. River 2. I've 3 bet him a few times, but this is the first time he's 3-bet me. On to the hand:

PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, $0.10 BB (6 handed) - Poker-Stars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

saw flop | saw showdown

UTG ($10.15)
Hero (MP) ($25.55)
CO ($14.45)
Button ($25.40)
SB ($12.25)
BB ($10)

Preflop: Hero is MP with A, K
1 fold, Hero bets $0.30, 2 folds, SB raises to $1.30, 1 fold, Hero calls $1

Flop: ($2.70) A, 3, 8 (2 players)
SB bets $2, Hero calls $2

Turn: ($6.70) Q (2 players)
SB checks, Hero checks

River: ($6.70) 10 (2 players)
SB bets $5, Hero calls $5

Total pot: $16.70 | Rake: $0.80

Results:
SB had A, A (three of a kind, Aces).
Hero mucked A, K (one pair, Aces).
Outcome: SB won $15.90

The hand seems pretty standard until the river. Basically, since this is the first time I've seen him 3-bet through ~100 hands, I'm putting him on a pretty tight range. Something like TT+, AQs+, AKo sounds right. That is probably too loose for most at $10NL, but he seemed fairly decent, so I'll give some credit. Anyway, This is a WA/WB situation on the flop, significantly favoring the WA (1 combo of AA left, vs 3 of KK, 6 each of QQ-TT). So I'm comfortable just calling, since he's not putting in any more money unless he has the AA. He has at most 2 outs, and I might get another bet out of his pairs on the river. Turn and river are very bad cards for my hand, since it improves his range's equity against my hand. I was mentally prepared to call a bet of up to $3.5 on the river before the T came off.

IMO, he never makes this size of a bet with KK or JJ. So I'm essentially calling vs his river range of TT, QQ, AA, and maaaaybe AKs, AQs. I'm losing to all of these but the AK (and even with that hand I think he checks the river most of the time).

At the time, I had been making a number of hero calls at several tables that had all turned out right (for pretty siginificant financial gain), and so I guess I just wanted to keep it going. I thought about the call for nearly 30 seconds before making it, but clearly in retrospect its a terrible call given his range.

Otherwise the day turned out very well. I was able to run at +18 PTBB/100 over 540 hands. If I am able to fold this river, that turns into +23 PTBB/100. At least I know I won't be making the same mistake again soon.

lol donkaments

Some days it seems like there is just nothing you can do. Been true for a couple days now... Case in point:


PokerStars No-Limit Hold'em, 5.5 Tournament, 125/250 Blinds 25 Ante (9 handed) - Poker-Stars Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com

saw flop | saw showdown

UTG+1 (t7410)
MP1 (t6590)
MP2 (t4570)
MP3 (t2545)
CO (t30600)
Button (t15840)
SB (t18635)
BB (t9775)
Hero (UTG) (t11182)

Hero's M: 18.64

Preflop: Hero is UTG with Q, Q
Hero bets t750, 4 folds, CO raises to t2250, 3 folds, Hero raises to t11157 (All-In), CO calls t8907

Flop: (t22914) 8, A, J (2 players, 1 all-in)

Turn: (t22914) 7 (2 players, 1 all-in)

River: (t22914) 4 (2 players, 1 all-in)

Total pot: t22914

Results:
Hero had Q, Q (one pair, Queens).
CO had Q, A (one pair, Aces).
Outcome: CO won t22914

Losing 70/30's all over the place. And coolers when I'm not. Ex: AcKc @15/30 raise pre, call min3bet. Get it in on a flop of 3h8c7c, expecting between 9-15 outs, and probably averaging at least 12. Not this time, his AA holds. Blah.. F Tournies.