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I’ve been 4-tabling 50NL on the iPoker network for about a week and starting to get some decent data into Poker Tracker. Not yet sure if I’ll make a mission out of it like I did on PokerStars earlier in the year – I’m not convinced it’s a great game, and there’s barely enough time before the end of the year to get in enough hands for a reasonable win goal.
Mostly I just want to retain the VIP level I achieved playing $2/4 limit (running like God for a couple of weeks, then crashing back down and giving up) for a sweet $100 monthly cash bonus. Playing for points is only marginally foolish, of course.
I’ve been thinking that there are a lot of super-tight – I mean really stupidly tight – players on there and have been seeing some Poker Tracker stats to that effect, but I just wasn’t really sure if it was just an anomoly at first. There’s always some nits in every game, but when I seem to be always sitting down to see table averages of % flops seen instantly pop up in single figures, it’s a little unusual.
Sure, I still don’t have enough data to know the figures are accurate, and I often have only half the table tracked, but it’s still a whole load more rocks that you’d like to see at the table.
As my data is grows, these trends continue. Just now I was playing against two of the nittiest players I’ve ever seen.
The first had paid to see 6.3% of flops – that’s 30 hands played from the 480 I’d seen him be dealt. Even 12% would be awfully tight, and he’s playing half that. It’s just one every 16. That’s only just more than the frequency you should be dealt a pocket pair. Even if that’s not his strategy, we know he has a very narrow range of hands when he does decide to play which means he’s a fairly predictable opponent (which I like) but he’s using a seat that could be taken by a player who is more likely to dump off his stack the next time I get a lucky flop (which I don’t like).
The other was an impressive 1.8% VP$IP ("voluntarily put money in the pot") over 220 hands. That’s just 4 non big blind hands played from a sample that’s one less than enough to include every possible starting hand (it won’t – that would be a statistical freak – but it’s big enough to start seeing patterns). Of those hands played, we saw two at showdown: he raised JJ from middle position and completed a small blind with 88. Those crazy gamblers.
There are many more players sitting at about 10% VP$IP and that means I’ve been jumping around tables a lot trying to find somebody to actually play with. There is the occasional juicy loose player that helps to keep the table average out of the gutter, but actually very few who fall in-between these extremes. A cynical man might say it’s just full of bots and shills…
It does seems like it’s been much easier than I’m used to to steal blinds and stab at pots, but also much harder to get payoffs with monsters so I’ve tried to start adjusting accordingly. I’m hesitating to go too far with the all-out aggression though because it just seems so unlikely that there would be so many players in one place – a poker site, of all places – who just don’t want to play poker.
I was starting to think that it never, ever went to 3 bets pre-flop in this game, and that all-ins were never called unless it was AA vs AA, or occasionally KK on a short stack. Plenty of ratholers about, but mostly also sitting back and waiting for a big pair. Seemed like winning a full stack was virtually impossible.
But you wait around for a week, then two come along at once.
My pocket kings got it all in pre-flop against an ace-jack for a full stack and it held up, and I flopped the nut straight with AK and re-raised all in against two players to be instacalled by AT – bottom pair, but top kicker. Yummy.
The other player – a 12% rock – said he folded a set. I believe him.
Those two hands literally doubled my win rate on the week. Obviously, I still need more data but here’s a graph that I can savour for the time being.
I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t know how to adjust to the standard of play in the EPT satellites. Particularly on Sunday, it seems I had a lot to learn. The following mania all happened during level 2 (blinds 50/100).
The under-the-gun player raises to 350. A frustrated Scandinavian calls and the next player re-raises to 900. The re-raiser only has 700 left, so he’s going nowhere and I’m suspicious about why he hasn’t just moved all-in already. I find pocket jacks in the cut-off. It’s the best hand I got to see in either tournament, but with an UTG raiser who has me well covered, it’s not a good spot to gamble my stack so I fold. UTG makes the powerplay of a smooth call. Obviously he wants to take the flop 3-way, but the other guy dissapoints him. Naturally with a pot of over 2000, the remaining 700 gets thrown in on a low flop. We see the re-raiser’s pocket 9s hold up against UTG’s T8s.
Lessons learned: Pocket pairs are always raising hands. Folding to a re-raise is weak.
I stayed out of the way for this one. All folded to the button who raised to 350. He had 98o, but the steal attempt is OK. Big blind defends with J5, a little stubborn but in fact the best hand. Soulscan successful. When the flop comes J97, carnage ensues. BB check-raises all-in with his monster top pair and the button decides it’s a great idea to not get pushed around, calling his last 4000 chips to win about 6000 with a gutshot and middle pair. Seat open.
Lessons learned: Always defend your blind by calling out of position with garbage. Folding a straight draw is weak.
That bustee had used up all his luck in an earlier hand when he had raised small preflop with pocket aces, followed by a massive all-in overbet on a 952 flop. Just go ahead and tell everybody how strong you were before the flop and hope nobody caught up. For sure you won’t get called now unless they got very lucky to outflop you. But outflopped he was, by pocket 2s. Then turn 5, river 5 put him back in front in the cruelest way possible.
Next, I limp after three others with 67s. One more player calls and the short stack big blind moves all in. I’m starting to get desparate and wonder if there’s any reason to call here after it’s folded back to me. I decide it’s not even close – the pot odds aren’t good and the raiser has been quite tight. In fact, in the land of the results-oriented, my 67 would have made a straight. I know this because the player on the button called and also made the straight with 63o. Pocket aces went home.
Lessons learned: Limp with any old shit if you have position. Folding once you have put chips in the pot is weak.
I didn’t survive long into level 3. In fact the levels were a complete trainwreck. We were sent on a break at what I thought was the end of level 2, but when we got back it was still the same level. "Another 2 minutes at this level", they announced. About fifteen minutes later, the blinds actualy went up.
In level 3, blinds are 100/200. The only reason there are still t25 chips in play is that antes kick in on level 4. And to think I was worried that I might not be able to make an 8pm train home if I did well.
I was down to a thousand and change on my small blind and with 3 limpers already wanting to take a cheap look I completed with 78s. The big blind pays no attention to the action so far and makes it 500 to go. One of the limpers now decides to fold, but two do come along for the ride. Having been unable to find any spots to gather chips so far and expecting to be called if I actually get chance to open-push in the next orbit, I decide I have to play this hand. I could call and close the betting, then be the first to throw my chips at any flop that looks good, but I don’t fancy pulling a stop-and-go against three other players, and with less than 1/5th of the pot size left to bet. By moving all-in here, I want to re-open the betting to allow the agreesor to isolate, and leave plenty of dead money in the pot to give a reasonable payoff if my second-best hand improves. Not a superb situation to be in, but I’d run out of time and couldn’t expect to see much better.
In fact we take a flop four ways, and it doesn’t really surprise me – even though one of the callers has left himself with just 300 chips now. Never mind. I’m right back in the game if I get lucky here. Flop: 89T with two spades – a pair and open ended straight draw. Could be worse, until I see the other cards. 67 is loving his made straight and I can only split with him. But we’re both actually drawing dead to QJ in spades – the current nuts with a flush draw to boot.
So there ends my EPT journey. £660 for less than three hours of poker. Next year, I think I’ll probably not bother.
Worst £300 tournament ever?
3000 chips, 30 minute clock and skipping just about every other blind level. They got me all excited to start with by giving out 5000 chips, then cruely taking them back. When this happened one of the know-it-all regulars was saying how he’d prefer the larger stack but would want a faster clock, maybe 20 minutes. Yeah, that would be swell. Now fuck off and go play blackjack if you just want to take two cards and let somebody tell you if you won.
I didn’t really get going, then when I had to push – after just an hour and a half – my QT was called by another QT (fantastic) and then my pocket 3s ran into a bigger pair and I was done. The board showed JJ99Q and the dealer tried to convince everyone that it was a split (I tip handsomely for this btw) but obviously the other guy’s tens played. Hey, at least he was reading the hands and not just assuming that no 3 on board means I didn’t improve.
Even with just 40 people, this structure was too fast. Yet, off I go again shortly to give it another go. I had considered waiting until Monday evening after I discovered they had scheduled a 200-max satellite, but if it’s going to be a push fest the smaller field is less likely to be heartbreaking.
So, here’s the live update graph for today’s satellite (and I have set it up with the correct phone number for text updates now!). Blink and you’ll miss it, probably.
I’ve been playing promotions with Sporting Index whenever they’ve offered anything that looks favourable. These are usually offers to refund your losses if you play a set amount on their novelty games, but I’ve always come out losing and getting the refund.
If, like today, the requirement is ten bets with a refund of net losses up to £30, I’ll usually play an even money bet nine times and then lump whatever I have left on one final no-lose bet for the win. In what must be close to ten previous efforts (I wrote about a couple of them here and here, and then stopped counting) the bet that matters has always lost.
Not that I’d ever imply that online gambling could be easily rigged, oh no. Especially not stupid novelty games like "soccer shootout" where a cartoon footballer that you cannot influence kicks a ball at goal a few times and gets awarded points if he scores against a computer-controlled goalkeeper. The number of points you get is related to where the ball hits the net – just like real life. Goooooaaaaaallll! You win, well, let’s say six points this time.
Assuming that their roulette game is fair, and forgetting that games of chance don’t have a memory, then was definitely owed before I hit a massive £26 profit today. Nine bets of £2 betting red all the way with four wins and five losses put me in good shape for one last bet… and it came in!
 My shot at NL100 lasted just over 3500 hands. I lost the 5 buy-ins I’d allowed myself, mostly in spectacular fashion.
I’ve never seen so many flopped sets get beaten! It’s pretty difficult to say how I thought I was playing at that level, because whenever it felt like I’d got going, the doomswitch flipped in and spoilt it all.
Spoken like a true loser, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Really, five buy ins just isn’t enough to know for sure – my last two major beats alone could have been a $320 swing in the right direction if the poker gods had just smiled in my direction a little. After being so close to getting back even, too…
I did have some rotten luck, but I also came up against both players who were tougher than at 50NL and, apparently, also more terrible moves than I’d seen at that level. I wasn’t quite sure how to adjust to this mix, or even whether the guys calling me down with bottom pair were really that bad, or just had a good sense of when to do that and it worked out for them often enough that they could afford to keep up this image. Oh for a few thousand more hands to try to find out…
NL50 definitely seems more weak-tight, and either my style already suited that game, or I’d already adapted to playing in those conditions. I know there’s some adjustments I still need to make to do better at NL100 the next time I get there. Assuming that I can grind my way back up, and I wasn’t just on a 40 buy-in upswing all along…
But for now it’s as I was just three days ago. Wow, that’s a bit depressing, but I need to stay patient, try to forget anything I was trying to do to adjust to NL100, and above all remember that $2 pre-flop isn’t a minimum raise any more.
 I reached my target of $2000 won at NL50 today. After the steady climb from $0 to about $1300, everything went very erratic with a frustrating long period without any overall win, a massive upswing, a big downswing and then another big upswing. I was in two minds whether this was indeed the right time to move up – I really didn’t want to do it on a massive upswing because I knew that wasn’t sustainable and the doomswitch would be just around the corner.
Tonight I took the plunge. This is only a shot at the higher limit, and I decided that if I fall 5 buy-ins then I should drop down again for a while. It’s difficult to report anything after one session (I played about 800 hands) but I don’t think the higher stakes are particularly scaring me yet. I had something of a baptism of fire, running into quads with a full house on my first orbit and then being treated to the wrong end of a set vs set battle three times. I don’t actually have the figures for how rare this is (probably something I should know) but I don’t think I’d been on the losing end of set vs set three times in total at the lower level!
I know it’ll be tough if I continue to see my bankroll slip away so rapidly, but so far the game doesn’t feel too different and I felt like I was in control. I’m used to raising using clicks on the bet slider, so a 3x pre-flop raise is still two clicks, even though it’s now $3, not $1.50.
Watch this space – more graphs to come for sure!
Perhaps I should have waited before fudging my graphs. Variance is playing games with me, but this time I’m not too bothered. Just look at this!
Slight recovery.
I appear to be broken. Tell me this is no big deal…
I’ve already jinxed myself by doing something as results-oriented as actually having a win goal and writing about it here. I’ve just further done myself damage by waiting until the very second I passed the half way mark to take a screenshot of my graph.
A few minutes ago, I passed $1000 in profit playing only $50 NL on PokerStars. The magic number was $1000.10, in fact. Out came Poker Grapher, and here’s the story so far. All you graph lovers can click on it for the full size version.
As you’d expect, I’ve since dropped back under a grand.
My win rate is clearly lower than it was at the last checkpoint. It took under 6,000 hands to win the first $500, but over twice as many to make it to $1000. My overall win rate just clears $5 per 100 hands. I’m getting very close to 20,000 hands played now, which is starting to resemble a decent sample size. I don’t know whether I should assume I ran hot to start, have just had worse than average cards for a while, or if overall 5BB/100 about right and it all evens out in the end.
The main thing though is that the line has kept on moving in the right direction. 🙂
Plenty of added value at Stars right now too. Seeing as I only started playing $50 NL there to clear a bonus, I was pretty plesed to see another $150 reload bonus come along today. This time it’s because of the impending momentous occasion of their 10 billionth dealt hand. In addition, there’s a money aded tournament every hour, and FPPs clock up at twice their normal rate.
I’ll easily make it to Gold Star this month now. Double rakeback too. Given that I’ve paid just over $300 in rake this month for enough FPPs to buy about £20 in Amazon gift certificates, I figure it’s usually about 12% rakeback for a Silver Star player. Should be about 16% for Gold Star. Not the best by any means, but not a bad deal considering you don’t have to jump through any hoops to get rakeback.
It appears that I’m doing somewhat better than I expected at no limit ring games. This really is the first time I’ve tested myself over more hands than I needed to play to clear a particular bonus or to gain a particular membership level. After nearly 6000 hands, I’ve been beating $50 NL on Poker Stars for just over $8 for every 100 hands. Not too shabby at all.
Of course this started when I had a bonus to clear. I still had about 1400 points left to earn towards the 1500 I needed to unlock a $150 bonus on Stars. The bonuses now have an expiry date and I just couldn’t see myself clearing it before June playing $12 turbo sit-and-gos. $1 in tournament fees is 5 player points, so that’d be nearly 300 tournaments.
I started off by trying their $25 NL as I’d done OK at this level clearing Party Poker bonuses in the past. It didn’t take long to realise that you earn virtually no FPPs at this level. $50 NL still doesn’t generate the abundance of rake (and hence the freely flowing frequent player points) that you get from $2/$4 or $3/$6, but the last time I played fixed limit at these levels I was constantly frustrated. I felt I was playing OK, but the game on Stars was tough and I wasn’t good enough to beat the rake. I maintained Gold Star status for a few months, lost a few hundred dollars but earned enough points to get a jacket I didn’t really need and couple of hundred quid to spend at Amazon. About even, obviously.
 I’d also expected the no limit tables on Stars to be tough, but so far so good. I’ve now hit the $500 profit milestone. The graph from Poker Grapher uses my Poker Tracker database, which treats one big bet as twice the big blind amount. So with $0.25/$0.50 blinds, the scale on this graph is 1 BB = $1.
It took two weeks to get here, and even though I finally cleared the bonus a few days ago I decided to keep playing as it felt like I’d fallen into a groove playing four tables at this level. A good, winning groove at that. I could get a rhythm going with up to 8 tables at $2/$4 but it was often be painful. Literally. If a session turned bad quickly I’d start to cramp up. That just hasn’t happened (so far) playing no limit.
It’s still not a massive sample size but the graph direction is definitely reassuring. I know there’s room for improvement. I’m going to find it and I’ve already spotted some pretty big mistakes. For example, I knew pocket kings was no good to a fifth raise pre-flop, but I had to prove I was right. Was the satisfaction of being right worth more than the $30 I lost? Not quite. It took nearly 400 hands (on average) to win that back.
But now I have a target, although obviously it if all goes tits up there’s a chance I’ll never write about it again. If nobody has coined the phrase "blogger’s discretion" yet, I want to be the first. I’d like to think I’ll stay on top of this one and in fact the timing works out just nicely.
Providing things stay good at this level, I’ll move up in stakes once I’ve won $2000. I want to be comfortable playing $100 NL by the time I go to Vegas in July.
I’m sticking with $50 NL on Stars for as long as there are no bonuses I need to play anywhere else. If a juicy reload comes along then I’ll probably stop to play that through instead, but I’m hoping that Stars can be my home for a long time to come.
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