I’d wiped the slate clean on my poker results spreadsheets on 1st Jan. Things didn’t go exactly to plan with me playing a pretty random collection of tournaments and running quite cold indeed. This one was random too – it was just whatever was starting after I managed to get online from my hotel in King’s Cross.
PokerStars Tournament #40451369, No Limit Hold’em Buy-In: $10.00/$1.00 1101 players
You finished the tournament in 7th place. A $363.34 award has been credited to your Real Money account.
It all went my way early on, getting some stupidly easy payoffs every time I hit a hand and I then managed to maintain and stay in the top pretty much all the way. This was a 10 minute level tournament – not quite a speed game, but faster than usual and by the end the monster chip leader only had 20 big blinds in his stack. I ended up busting after I pushed with KJs and ran into an eager caller with AJ in the blind.
I was deliberately not looking at my results spreadsheet to see how much I had to win to get back even for the year, or I’d probably have played much weaker and tried to limp into as big a payoff as possible, whilst never standing a chance of winning the thing. This is a very good payoff for a $10 tournament and three hours work (although, of course, first place was over 2 grand) but it still doesn’t quite get me out of the hole. Nevertheless, I’m pretty darn pleased with the result, and in terms of performance against a large field, this is probably my best MTT result ever. Certainly my best result on Stars.
Just got home to find a beautiful home-made Christmas card in the mail, apparently from Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. I guess I haven’t been paying enough attention to realise that these two were connected in some way, other than both offering insane amounts of reload bonuses – it’s basically free rakeback for everyone as long as you keep cycling money through.
I haven’t played on Absolute for, probably, a year. Their bonuses attract a huge number of rocks – probably female rocks if their marketing is successful – so the games just aren’t that good. My hand history shows nothing more than me dumping a free $5 bonus on blackjack in September. I’ve played maybe three or four tournaments on Ultimate Bet in total, never really got going on there after signing up because of some of the satellites they run. I’ve never had any freebies from them.
But in the spirit of Christmas, here’s some free money! And not just a few dollars to my poker account with a play requirement before I can actually withdraw it… inside the Christmas card was a disposable American Express card preloaded with $25!
That’s as good as real money. If only I could think of somewhere that will actually accept it…
Apparently I’m going to be featured in The Sentinel tomorrow. Possibly even on pages one and two, the photographer said! Surely something more interesting will happen in the meantime… even in Stoke.
This is thanks (I think… having second thoughts now!) to Mike who asked me if he could write and submit the story as part of his journalism course requirements. I’m not even sure if he’s getting credit for the story any more.
No doubt I’ll write more once I’ve had chance to read it. I’m down in London tomorrow though so I’ll have to rely on the online copy.
For anyone that ends up here as a result though (I don’t know if they’ll actually print my blog address – it was worth a try!) and wants to know more about Poker Dome, click on the banner below. Then click on it again. One click not good enough. It’s a security feature, or something.
My return trip from London usually involves a late train. That way I never have to worry about leaving the office on time, getting stuck on a delayed tube and missing the train. It does, however, mean that I’m hanging around for up to two hours at Euston. This is where a cheap First Class upgrade comes in handy. By "cheap" I mean that you get the very lowest tier of First Class ticket. These are only available after they stop serving hot food to your seat, and instead you get a sandwich and a banana. However usually they put the most expensive tickets at the front of the train so they get first dibs on all the snack food, and by the time yours truely gets served the sandwich choice is probably only egg.
It’s still better than at weekends, where you have to fetch everything yourself. And as the shop is right in the middle of standard class, you have to climb over three carriages of poor people (you can’t hear the irony, but it’s there I promise, because I only use the train at the weekend on a free ticket) to pick up a "snack box" that contains a couple of crackers and some dried fruit.
Still, it means I get somewhere warm to sit for a couple of hours with an unlimited supply of complimentary coffee and crisps. Today, they even have some rather nice chocolate truffles. I was actually disciplined enough to just have one. Impressive.
When I’m bumming about in the lounge above Euston Station, I’m usually online. No change there. There’s a wifi hotspot – touted as a feature of first class, when you still have to pay £4/hr to use it – but I now have my super funky phone with wireless modem and unlimited data calls, which is just as good when there’s 3G coverage.
Today, the phone said I had a full four bars of 3G signal but I couldn’t connect to squat. It dialed, it thought, it gave up. Same thing happened trying to get online from the phone itself, and it’s still the same problem now that I’m on the train. I waited a good ten minutes on hold to T-Mobile, but nobody is there this time of night… at half past six? Unlikely. So I decided to bite the bullet – and bite into some complimentary fruit cake – and pay for the wifi. I still had over an hour to kill and thought I may as well do something useful, even if "something useful" is trying to find out whether the 6-max $2/$4 game at Noble Poker is as soft as it appears to be, or if I just ran very hot so far. The early signs are good (and here I go tempting fate again). Sure, I’ve been getting lucky with some hands, but it’s so lovely and passive, they’re just always letting me catch up – and then paying me off! Of course I don’t mind winning $30 pots with two pair made on the turn from 47o in the big blind, it’s just a little embarassing… I’m sure people in the lounge were watching me!
However, as I’ve bought into Gutshot folklore, I was particularly pleased with this hand. Would have been worth an extra $50 at their online cardroom too!
The hotspot let me log in, but I had zero credit and when I tried to reload it said "this feature is not available". There’s an award winning business plan buried away in there somewhere I’m sure…
So I was feeling a little marooned. NO INTERNET! But then I remembered the time I playing PokerStars here and my credit ran out but I was still able to play. I hadn’t figured out whether it was because I still had an open connection and it didn’t know how to disconnect me after the credit ran out, or if it just wasn’t configured to block poker traffic. Turns out, it’s their configuration. Which means…
Free poker!
Well, for some sites anyway. Noble Poker worked just fine. I could see the lobby and sit at tables. The only problem was accessing the cashier, which uses web pages within the client. But as I already had a balance, I could play away happily. And, yes, it still feels pretty soft. I think Stars will work, although I couldn’t test it properly. It tried to get a software update, presumably from a web site, and failed. Party Poker and Mansion would not connect at all, but Paradise worked fine, and their cashier does not use the web so it looks like you get full functionality. For free!
That’s about all I had time to check, but I’ll be doing more research! They definitely block web and email access until you sign in with a credit card, and apparently MSN messenger too. However I could connect to ICQ and Yahoo! Messenger without any problems, and without paying!
I only have limited experience with wireless hotspots. The odd hotel and airport, and once at Starbucks when it was the hot new thing, which was memorable because it just didn’t work. I wonder just how many actually allow free access like this!
Playing beyond your bankroll completely rocks when you get lucky. 🙂
I knew the PokerDome satellite was too expensive for me to justify buying into direct. Even with its awesome added value – a $215 seat was worth $343 tonight – I’m just not serious enough or good enough to play three-figure buy in tournaments on a regular basis. I was well aware that I couldn’t continue playing this tournament every week, as I desparately wanted to, without running a little bit hot at first.
Last Saturday, I used some of the money remaining from the very nice Mansion NFL bet bonus I took advantage of earlier in the year to buy into the $100+$9 rebuy and the $200+$15 freezeout. It was pretty uneventful – I didn’t survive the first hour in either of them and couldn’t remember anything vaguely interesting to write about, so I didn’t even mention it.
Today I went only for the freezeout, figuring my balance could support two more cracks at it and I wasn’t really likely to play anything else at Mansion. They have a few money-added tournaments during the day, but they’re now making a big deal about a Christmas tournament series with $250,000 added. Very attractive (and a $50+$5 buy in is much more realistic for me) but they all start at 3am. So despite the Mansion server clock being GMT, they pretty much don’t give a hoot about their European players and have put this quarter of a million up for grabs only to attract the Americans that are still looking for a place to play. You can see why they’d do that, but just a couple that start during the day for US players – a token effort – would be nice.
Oh, did I forget to say the result before I went off on one?
First place baby! $7000 PokerDome package and $3430 cash.
What follows now will probably be waffle. I’m completely wired but also in need of sleep (I have to catch a train at 07:24). In this case especially, the size of the prize is much more interesting than how I actually won it, so I definitely won’t be offended if you don’t read any further.
Everything started great and I was chip leader within 15 minutes after eliminating two players with big pairs that held up. Had to make a terrifying all-in call with QQ on TT2 flop. The other player had called my third raise pre-flop and moved all-in immediately after the flop. There’s a chance he’s playing AA or KK in a donkish way there, but I found it hard to believe he wouldn’t try to check-raise me on that board if he had anything that beats my queens. In fact, a check-raise there may well have got me to fold the QQ (I’d be putting him on JJ-AA), but instead he donated his stack when AK did not improve.
Players fell fast down to three tables remaining. Two tables were getting paid, with $350 for places 10-18. On the bubble there were three mega short stacks, with about 1000 chips each and blinds at 300/600. I had a heart attack when I saw KK on the big blind with players who mostly had me covered, and was never more pleased to get a walk with a big hand. It wasn’t just me who wanted to lock in $350 then – that’s almost two more goes at this in my weak mind!
There were some crippled stacks on the final table so it dropped to 6 remining pretty quickly. That had guaranteed me a four-figure payday. I was keeping up with the pack pretty well, but I know I could have played stronger to take advantage of the bubble effect – when two players had very short stacks but the next jump in money was $600, I fancied the $600. I was helped by someone playing AK much too passively. He smooth-called a minimum raise from a habitual min-raiser, forcing me to pay one bet to see a flop with K8s from the big blind. I didn’t hesitate when the flop came KQ8 and got the payoff.
The jump between 4th and 3rd was $1500 and I was extremely glad that it happened on a pretty easy decision. I had AJs on the big blind and the small stack button pushed. He flipped over J8o and stood up.
Then I dithered a bit too much. The problem (if you can call four grand in the bank a problem) was that 3rd paid a nice chunk of cash ($4116) whereas 2nd was "only" $235 in addition to the PokerDome package. $4116, or indeed the $3430 extra for first place, would nicely take care our house rental next summer. Claire did just this with the extra cash she won alongside her WSOP seat last year, so I wanted to do the same. So my strategy at that point should have been to go for broke: get myself a massive chip lead or bomb out and guarantee the biggest cash prize on offer. Finishing 2nd, chances are I’m going to Vegas by myself, unless by some freak of timing the event I’ve qualified for is either the weekend we’re already going to be there or lands in a school holiday. Plus, I’d heard other players talking about previous satellites, saying that the 3rd place finisher is also taken to Vegas as a reserve.
By the time I’d realised that I needed to make this adjustment, it was too late. The other two were going at it, and we were heads up. The other guy had about a 2:1 chip lead on me. Playing, basically, a freeroll for $3000 in a satellite is a very strange experience. It’s the biggest leap in prize money on offer, even though both the players remaining have pretty much already achieved what they came for. We were both on our way to Vegas. But the tournament just kept on playing, there was no time to take that in, no time to start leaping around and not even time to go and wake Claire and get a sleepy hi-5. I’d been running excitedly back and forth with updates all the way down to 5 players left, as she’s much more conscientious at the whole having-to-get-up-at-6.30 thing than me. That’s like 5 hours away… and still no way I can sleep!
The heads up slaughter lasted about 45 minutes. I suck at heads up. I’m way too weak, and this guy was a big bully. He bashed me down to about 15k vs his 120k and I got lucky to survive. From then on I somehow slogged my way back even, eventually picked up a big hand and got paid off and once I’d fought my way to a 3:1 chip lead his TT held up against my AQ and we were back to level footing. Same old story – he bashes away at me and I have to get lucky again. Although by now I’m wondering if the Kill Phil heads up strategy of "go all in every hand" wasn’t such a bad idea. I was definitely outclassed, but on the bright side I now have some great experience of playing heads up for a big prize.
We already know that it’s bad karma to turn down a deal. Here we were, almost at the stage where it was time to race random cards for $3000 and I offer a deal. Don’t even know if it’s possible to do that on Mansion, but he wasn’t interested anyway. Can’t blame him really. He knew he was better, and I’d have been overjoyed to take any kind of deal to have it over with.
But when it’s with you it’s with you. I got ahead again, calling a small bet with middle pair and making 2 pair on the river. I never saw what he had, but I must have been behind most of the way. So with nearly a 4:1 chip lead I decided to have a crack with K9 to try and end it. It was good enough:
Now, you never know, going on TV might be enough to push me just that little bit harder to lose some weight…
… but if anyone would care to come and sweat me, we’re down to 11 players in the PokerDome satellite and I just about have an average stack. I’m already in the money, thanks to Mansion’s fantastic overlay, but it starts to get really interesting at the final table. Top two go to Vegas…
Full report to follow, probably.
— 22:54. Quickest edit ever. I’d just pressed "save" on this, and it dealt me QQ with a raise in front of me. I took it down with a reraise though. Whew, as they say.
— 22:57. Second quickest edit ever. Same situation, this time JJ. Apparently I’m second in chips after that resteal!
— 23:30. Brief update at end of 3rd hour. 5 left and I have 2 grand in the bank. I’m second bottom in chips though and the blinds are mental. I think it’ll be over pretty quick either way.
A new month, so a new player points quota to hit to retain GoldStar status on PokerStars. And retain it I must, because I know I’ll never actually get around to redeeming my FPPs this month and most of the stuff I want is for GoldStar and higher.
Now I know I said I was gonna keep plugging away at $2/$4 and probably rack up 10,000 hands this month, but it was doing my head in. I had to take a break, so I spent some time playing $50NL and $100NL and the occasional pot-limit table. Had moderate success but don’t have anything like enough hands to know whether I’m really going to turn a long-term profit on those games.
I have been given a hot tip though, a site to play at that is apparently very soft. I take this with a pinch of salt, although the reasoning makes sense. It’s a bookmaker that has just added poker and is marketing it exclusively to its existing sports bettors. If it’s any good I’ll be sure to comment, and if it’s not then I’ll probably even name it 🙂 Only have a couple of sessions, but when I doubled up on $100 NL with my TT flopping top set against a T2 eventually made two pair, it seemed like a good start. Yummy.
It’s time to focus again, so I’m back to mutli-tabling fixed limit. For a while at least. I have a hypothesis from today’s session: $3/$6 is a better game for me than $2/$4 on PokerStars. Yes I know it’s a small sample size and one winning session doesn’t make me a champ, but for the first time in ages I felt comfortable at these tables. I’d started at $2/$4 but seen that there were four tables at $3/$6 that were considerably looser – about 35% VPIP – and hardly any waiting list for any of them. They played much more like the $2/$4 I was used to from PokerRoom, before they dumped their American players. At times they even played like the fantastic $2/$4 games in Vegas with 6 or 7 players to a flop. Definitely going to be keeping a closer eye over the weekend and see if I can find out whether I’m better suited to $3/$6.
I can’t believe i haven’t realised until today just how much added value there is in the PokerDome satellites. I’ve only made it to the main satellite once, mostly because I regularly manage to forget that the $20 freezeout qualifier starts at 8.15pm. They’re not bad themselves, often a small overlay to make up the two guaranteed seats into the next round.
Today I was thinking about buying in direct, simply because the package on offer was for the tournament taking place whilst we are in Vegas at Christmas. Then, true to form, I managed to miss the start and I kicked myself harder than usual after I noticed just how juicy this satellite was. They guarantee two seats for Vegas – kind of essential to make sure the TV show goes ahead. What I didn’t realise, and perhaps I just wasn’t paying close enough attention or maybe they just don’t a big enough deal about it, is that one seat is added to the prize pool and as far as I can tell it’s added regardless of the actual entries. This week there were 69 players, paying $200 each. That’s $13800 in the prize pool, which would be just shy of funding the two $7000 seat prizes. But rather than just add $200 to make it up, there was in fact $6800 up for grabs in consolation cash.
Not only that, but they paid the whole final table – 9 prizes from 69 runners is a little flatter than usual, and makes it just that little bit more appealing for a tournament that’s not exactly within my bankroll. A $200 online tournament is definitely out of my comfort zone to buy in direct. I even get cold feet when it comes to using PokerStars T$ or W$ for the actual events I’ve qualified for! But when you’re actually getting, effectively, $300 worth of seat for $200 I’m going to find this hard to resist!
Of course, if I can actually remember the satellites this week it won’t be an issue.. 🙂
Here’s a hand from a PokerDome satellite I played today.
Blinds are 75/150 and I have 2250. I am dealt Ah Ad on the button. Lovely. A middle position player who has about twice as many chips as me raises to 300. A fantastic minimum raise. I strongly suspect he doesn’t have aces here, and if he does well that’s just the way cards are falling for me lately.
I reraise, making it 900 to go. If he’d made a proper raise I could think about smooth calling here in position, but I can’t let the blinds see a cheap flop. So far so good I think.
He makes the call and I see a horrible flop: Jh Qd Kc.
The only good thing I can say about this flop is that it’s unsuited. It’s still about the worst flop ever for pocket aces in a pot that saw two raises pre-flop. All those big pairs that you had crushed have suddenly caught up. I figure two Kings would want to apply more pressure pre-flop, but can’t count on it. Two Jacks could get away from this but, in the hands of a big stack, could very likely wait for a low board before hanging themselves.
There are also legitimate two-pair threats, and I haven’t been paying enough attention to know whether this guy would call a reraise with KQ, KJ or QJ out of position. You’d hope not. Of course, what I’m really hoping for is to run into AK here, but there’s only two aces and three kings left. It’s unlikely.
There’s even the possibility of a maniac with KT who is not going to go anywhere, and would be just about correct to call for pot odds if I move all in. I’d still be a 2-1 favourite, but I wouldn’t like it. TT would have a hard time folding here too, figuring he may have 10 outs, when in fact a ten is no help and two of his straight cards are in my hand. Of all the likely hands that just got much stronger, TT is probably the least dangerous. But you’re still going home against it one time in four.
The stacks are nowhere near deep enough to have any chance of finding out where I stand. And not only is the other guy wearing shades, he’s also playing on the Internet – no tells here. I have one pot-sized bet left in me, which I think is probably going in the middle whatever happens. So I’ve decided I’m not folding. I mean, really, how can I?
Villian checks the scary flop. Doesn’t matter. He checks if he’s strong. He checks if he’s as scared as I am. There’s no more information to be had.
Now here’s the reason I’m posting this hand. I’ve don’t ever remember being in this situation before, and if I have been I certainly didn’t think about it this way. I’m in position, with a hand that could very well not be best any more but unable to find a way to fold. I check, and check with a reason. I’m ever so briefly a little bit smug. If I’m beat I’m beat. I’m losing my stack. If I’m winning and I move all in here, he’s going to be able to fold anything I beat, except maybe AK. He’s not folding anything that beats me, but will also be hating that board with any strong hand. By checking I bring on a free card that probably won’t matter, and encourage him to bet the turn. Which he will now probably do with any hand that pisses on mine, but me may also take the opportunity to push with that AK, which suddenly looks more attractive, or bluff with an underpair or a straight draw, or perhaps AQ or AJ.
I’m not saying this thinking is perfect. It probably isn’t. I need to find a way to get away from my aces if they’re no good, and maybe I could have controlled the pot size pre-flop better in order to be able to do that now. I’m also not saying that I put him on a hand I beat and checked to induce a bluff. That’s not possible here. All I can do is make sure that I get as many chips in the middle the times I’m actually ahead as I do the times when I’m toast.
It’s the wrong decision. He moves all in on the turn (couldn’t be more of a brick: 2s) and I call. He flips KQo, I hit a second deuce on the river and survive. I eventually bubbled.
I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while. It’s a peculiar decision with a reason that’s based on a negative attitude. The decision is not that unusual really. It’s easy to check there out of fear, just as it’s easy to shove your chips in out of panic.
I don’t ever recall being in such a horrible situation and having a clear plan. Now I just have to figure out whether the plan was any good. Feel free to chime in anytime.
So I thought I’d cracked it. Felt pretty good about my limit game over a reasonable number of hands. Then I went back to PokerStars, where in the past I’d been getting well and truely thrashed at this level, and it carried on looking good for a while. Two bonuses cleared and over $300 up on top. Now it’s all gone again.
My graph of the last 7000 hands (actually this includes some $1/$2 and $3/$6 too) makes me look pretty much like a break-even player with one very big rush, followed by an ice cold streak. Really, that’s a performance I should be happy with, considering how well I used to do on Stars – definitely shows improvement. But it’s inside my head again now: how can I tell whether I really suck at limit?
I’ve been here before. The question is not whether I believe it when I tell myself these swings are to be expected, but whether I should believe it. Sure, I’ve hit a bad streak. It’s only a 100 big bet downswing which is not that unusual. Or so you hear – I think I believe this now. I did go through an extremely cynical phase of thinking the explanation of big losing streaks was simply misinformation spread by writers and professionals, probably aided by the card rooms themselves. All of the above have a vested interest in keeping bums on virtual seats.
But how long do you keep going before you work out whether it’s just a run bad luck, or if you actually have a leak that needs to be plugged. Blaming the maths could be a great way to convince myself I’m really great, but consistently unlucky. Ruin then awaits.
If I’m going to live by the stats, Poker Tracker tells me that I’m not awful. A little too tight still maybe, but not awful. I’m sitting even after paying $300 in rake for those 7000 hands – winning about one big bet every 100 hands from players and giving it straight back to the house. If you should only expect to make 2BB/100 then I’m one-third of the way there.
Also I appear to be bitching about breaking even, which really is not an event worth writing, and just a little greedy. Sorry about that. At least for now I’m even, although my confidence has taken a beating. What I need is a goal to prove or deny my greatness. The rate I’m playing, I should easily get 20,000 hands in this month, if not more. I’m going to stick with PokerStars until that milestone and then take stock again. Hopefully things will be clearer by then, but if it’s still the same story I really don’t know what I’ll do!
There’s no bonus to clear, but I should hit PlatinumStar level and clock up at least a hundred quid’s worth of Amazon vouchers so even if its inconclusive I’ll get some free shit.
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