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Coincidence? First hand I play on PokerStars today and my premium hand loses to connected garbage.
PokerStars 2/4 Hold’em (8 handed) Hand History Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: HTML)
Preflop: Hero is BB with Qh, Qd. MP1 posts a blind of $2. UTG raises, 1 fold, MP1 (poster) calls, 3 folds, SB calls, BB 3-bets, UTG calls, MP1 calls, SB calls.
Flop: (12 SB) 5d, 4s, 7s (4 players) SB checks, BB bets, UTG calls, MP1 calls, SB calls.
Turn: (8 BB) 7c (4 players) SB checks, BB bets, UTG calls, MP1 calls, SB folds.
River: (11 BB) Ac (3 players)Hero checks, UTG checks, MP1 bets, Hero calls, UTG calls.
Final Pot: 14 BB
Main Pot: 14 BB, between Hero, UTG and MP1. Pot won by MP1 (14 BB).
Results: Hero has Qh Qd (two pair, queens and sevens). UTG has 6s 6h (two pair, sevens and sixes). MP1 has 7d 8s (three of a kind, sevens).
Outcome: MP1 wins 14 BB.
OK so he’d posted to play and it was only one bet to call. But with 78 offsuit. Out of position. And to an early position raise. I have to be pleased about having this player at the table though really, and what’s more pleasing is that he didn’t raise when his hand improved to a certain winner, giving me a much cheaper showdown than I should have had, and letting me check-call the scary river. Admittedly, with any card other than an Ace on the river and I’d be coming out firing, allowing him to raise but surely the smooth call – particularly vs two opponents – was a big mistake.
I don’t think you can fold for one bet on the river here as many players would bet regardless after I check the scare card. Leading out might be better to gain extra bets from worse hands (in this case, a juicy 66 makes a crying call). However I still don’t know if it’s an easy fold for one more bet and a big pot – can we be sure a raiser actually has a pair of aces or better, or is just taking a stab thinking I probably do not have an ace after betting all the way so far.
You just can’t beat free money from Party Poker! Their reload bonuses are very easy to clear even at the low limits, so when a 20% up to $100 bonus popped up on my account yesterday I got busy.
I decided to play for this bonus using $25NL only. I wanted to see how no limit compared to fixed limit hold’em as I’ve mostly played $1/$2 to clear these bonuses so far. Because the wagering requirements are based on a number of raked hands, regardless of the actual amount of rake paid, the limits do not really matter. In fact a quirk of this system is that you have to play less hands at $1/$2 to clear a bonus than at $2/$4 – although you pay more rake in total, $1/$2 games are raked in 25c multiples, whereas $2/$4 is raked $1 at a time.
I thought you would probably need to play more hands at $25NL than $1/$2 as there would be fewer flops, but really this doesn’t seem to be the case – I’d usually bank on slightly more than 50% of hands being raked at $1/$2.
Stand by, stat fans – here’s how I did 🙂
Hands played: 1540 (for 1000 raked hands)
Hours played: 23.63 (approx 6 hours @ 4 tables)
Rake paid: $30.10 (so Party Poker lose $69.90 on this promo!)
Amount won: $35.52 (4.61 BB per 100 hands)
Win rate: $5.92/hr
Bonus awarded: $100
Rate w/ bonus: $22.60/hr
Certainly not bad for the smallest game in town. And for those who like even geekier stats, here’s how I was playing:
Vol. Put $ In Pot: 14.29%
Pre-flop Raise: 7.21%
Post-flop Aggression: 3.72
Won $ When Saw Flop: 33.59%
Went to Showdown: 20.99%
Won $ At Showdown: 50.91%
Folded SB to Steal: 87.50%
Folded BB to Steal: 80.00%
Attempt to Steal Blinds: 18.57%
So it’s a fairly small sample size, but the diagnosis looks pretty good – firmly rooted in the Tight/Agressive camp. Poker Tracker gives me a little cash bag icon – result!
If I try to be objective, my blind play looks kinda weak, although 8 times out of 10 is probably nothing to be concerned with. Need more input. When there are a lot of limpers, as you get in these low limit games, there’s not too many opportunities to steal. I could be raising a bit more pre-flop, but again with lots of limpers I’m aware that my range of hands to raise with is tighter than usual, and limping into multiway pots with small pairs and suited aces becomes attractive.
Oh, and I appear to be rather aggressive post-flop. That one really surprised me as I still think I check/call too much on the river. The aggression factor is calculated as the number of times you bet or raise divided by the number of times you call (checking is ignored). A number between 2 and 3 – betting twice to three times as often as you call – is thought to be nicely aggressive.
Grrrr, then.
Until I started writing this blog all I had put under this domain was a very short page stating that I will buy PokerStars T$. I never really thought much of it because I never really took it any further – I was thinking about building an automated exchange process like on www.cashmanbrian.com, but that’s just another project I never got round to finishing. But checking the usage statistics, I’m actually still getting a fair bit of traffic to that page. So I thought I’d put the exact same rushed and pretty unhelpful wording back up. Here is is :
If you win a seat in a satellite on Poker Stars you can unregister from the event you qualified for and collect the value of the seat in tournament dollars, or T$.
You can then sell your T$ to me for real cash!
I will be putting more information on this web site shortly, meantime contact me at sell@luckydonut.com if you have a seat to sell.
So although the main reason I’ve done this is to try and keep that position in Google, the offer still stands. I’ll pay $200 real money for T$215 (the value of a Million Guaranteed seat) with transactions done through the PokerStars lobby.
The good fortune continues. I am H-O-T-T.
Back online this time, and I was logged into Blue Square Poker. I hardly ever play here – most of the tournaments have rebuys and are complete donkfests. Potentially profitable, but very frustrating, and there are many other games I’d rather play. The strong contingent of British players doesn’t help. Makes it a totally different game, and not in a good way. I’m bound to rant about this some other time, so I’ll leave it at that for the time being 🙂
I’d actually logged in to check out the satellites for Poker 6, which sounds like a great tournament and I wanted to qualify to have a crack at this. With live qualifiers as well as online, I was planning on having a few attempts. However I’ve since realised I can’t play on the second day (going to see Pet Shop Boys) which would make it all a bit pointless.
Anyway, I sit in their freeroll with a $200 prize pool – eventually I finish up with $3 from this – hoorah! – and an alert pops up for a $100 freezeout about to start. The prize pool is $3.5k guaranteed and there were only 19 players registered at the time. I’m thinking this could be a great way to press up my winnings from the Party Poker shootouts and I just can’t resist. I scramble for my switch card to get enough money in my account to play and just make it.
One of the annoying things about Blue Sq is that you have to do transactions in £ but then play games in $. I have Neteller in USD, which is not accepted, and two visa cards on USD bank accounts. No good – I still have to play in pounds and be at the mercy of their exchange rates.
At kick off there were 26 players registered, but that’s still a good overlay on the prize money – works out at $34 each and even with a $9 entry fee they are giving me $25 to taking part, which I always like! Top five were getting paid, and the top prize of $1470 was as good as my coveted seat in WSOP Event 37.
This game was amazingly different to anything I’d played on Blue Sq before. People folded. People knew when they were beat. There were some very strong players who managed to not go broke with hands that would cost many players their entire stack. I was pretty impressed.
I was more impressed that I managed to get to the final table with a decent stack remaining. I was even more impressed that I scraped second place, after being short stacked with 4 remaining. Two of the big stacks went against each other, leaving three short stacks and a big stack who didn’t really want to play any more.
I think I had quite a tight image, judging by the dialog between Conbert (3rd place finisher) and some railbird.
conbert : im well ***** off
conbert : lucky donut mr i need a hand to raise
conbert : n sumhow gets thru
SammyArry6 : maybe luckydonut is better?!
conbert : win 55 coinflip
conbert : i had the worst cards when it went 3 handed
conbert : by far
conbert : feels well sick though
conbert : luckydonut thinks a rag ace is a fold heads up
Here’s why I’m a bad player too.
conbert : the j9 was turnin point
conbert : bets 288 flop
conbert : 228 flop
conbert : i have 89
conbert : call to trap
conbert : ne he turns j
SammyArry6 : sick
conbert : first time in my life its happened to me
Wow, nice trap with a shit pair. First time in his life someone hit a 3-outer on him without making them pay for the next card? I got real lucky.
SammyArry6 : i’m layin fu muppet at 1/100 to win
SammyArry6 : luckydonut available at 25’s
SammyArry6 : perhaps it should be 10000000000000000000000000/1?
So they don’t fancy my chances. Well the other guy only had a 3-1 chip advantage… It actually lasted just one more hand so he woz right innit.
Seat 5 : LUCKYD0NUT has $10,680
Seat 6 : fu muppet has $41,320
Stakes: 600/1,200 Current level: 9 Level up in: 14 min. Break in: 56 min.
LUCKYD0NUT is the dealer.
LUCKYD0NUT posted small blind.
fu muppet posted big blind.
Dealing Hole Cards.
Seat 5 : LUCKYD0NUT has Qd 9c
LUCKYD0NUT called 600 and raised 9,480 and is All-in
fu muppet called 9,480
Showdown!
Seat 5 : LUCKYD0NUT has Qd 9c
Seat 6 : fu muppet has 5s 5d
Board cards [8c 3c Ah 4h Th]
LUCKYD0NUT has High Card : Ace
fu muppet has Pair: 5s
fu muppet wins 21,360 with Pair: 5s
Anything wrong with the push here?
Anyway, 2nd place got me $875. Total profit from Blue Sq: $766
ANTES/BLINDS
jcc_paco posts blind ($1), akagomme posts blind ($2).
PRE-FLOP
draver calls $2, bluespirit3 folds, Swaps folds, paganini69 calls $2, Spartacus2 folds, vpmaniac folds, lucky_donut bets $4, UFL_Gators folds, jcc_paco folds, akagomme calls $2, draver calls $2, paganini69 calls $2.
FLOP [board cards AS,QC,AD ]
akagomme checks, draver checks, paganini69 checks, lucky_donut bets $2, akagomme folds, draver folds, paganini69 calls $2.
TURN [board cards AS,QC,AD,4H ]
paganini69 checks, lucky_donut bets $4, paganini69 bets $8, lucky_donut bets $8, paganini69 calls $4.
RIVER [board cards AS,QC,AD,4H,4C ]
paganini69 checks, lucky_donut bets $4, paganini69 bets $8, lucky_donut bets $8, paganini69 calls $4.
SHOWDOWN
lucky_donut shows [ QH,QS ]
paganini69 shows [ 6S,AH ]
paganini69 wins $67.
Talk about spewing… it was pretty obvious this guy had an ace and I was in great shape, so how come I didn’t notice that the river card killed my hand? I guess 6 tables at a time is too many for me right now… I wouldn’t normally crank up that many, but I was just starting out and all the waiting lists came available at once. I figured I’d sit for an orbit at each table and see which ones looked the best…
Still can’t believe I didn’t see it!
This post is serialized and I’ve already posted the next parts. Just a cheap trick to try and get you to come back tomorrow really 🙂
In case I didn’t mention it yet, I’m going to Vegas in the summer and whilst there I will play in at least one WSOP event. Whilst Claire was on a mission to get into the Main Event (and yay! she did it!) I’ve only had a few goes so far and haven’t done particularly well. I’ll still have a few cracks at this, probably on PokerStars or Full Tilt, who are running satellites on the weekend before the event with 150 and 100 guaranteed seats respectively.
I also wanted to try and justify to myself playing a satellite in Vegas. These come in two flavours – $225 with $200 rebuys (1 seat for every 50 buy-ins) or a $1060 freezeout (1 seat for every 10 players). Strangely, I’m much more comfortable with the idea of the freezeout than the cheaper rebuy. It’s not a bad structure and a one-in-ten chance of getting through seems achievable if the wind is blowing in the right direction. Plus, so close to the main event, these games are going to be buzzing, and if I can’t make it this ill still be a great experience.
I wanted to win entry to WSOP Event 37 – $1500 No Limit Hold’em, which begins 2 days after we arrive in Vegas and is the last Hold’em event before the big one. It’s not a brilliant tournament with just 1500 starting chips, but a slower structure than the $540 and $225 second chance tournaments that take place every night which I’d also looked at as alternatives, just so I could get a piece of WSOP action. This one also has the added bonus of being an actual bracelet event!
There are a couple of ways to qualfiy directly for the preliminary events – Bodog and Pokershare both have satellites, but they’re at silly times. You can also use PokerStars FPPs to buy in, but I would need to go flat out, and I’m still getting killed in their limit games (you don’t earn points half as fast playing no-limit) so that’s not an attractive option.
So I decided to just pick some tournaments and go for the cash to make my entry fees.
First blood was last Monday 22nd May – I played a $20+$2 shootout on Party Poker, which if you’ve not seen these is quite a strange format. Each round is a single table tournament with the top three winning money and progressing to the next round. The game ends as soon as there are three players remaining, with the highest chip count taking first place, which coupled with the fact that you take your chip count to the next table means you can’t just sneak through.
I finished 1st in round one for $44.31, second in round two for $47.06, second in round three for $90.36 and 3rd in round four for $201.06. Total profit on the night was $360.79 – not a bad start at all. The eventual winner was super-aggressive and that strategy worked for him. I actually lost with 99 against his 96 offsuit. What can you do?
I do like this format, and the strategy to not only survive but win enough chips to be able to survive in later rounds is an interesting one. I’ve played a couple more since – getting money from rounds 2 and 3 respectively. I’ll win it one day 🙂
Total profit (so far!) from Party Poker shootouts: $411.30
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