The Lucky Donut

Poker Stars dealt their ten billionth hand this evening.

It played out at a 1c/2c blind, no limit hold’em table.  The winner, justine0003, had a stack of $0.82c at the start of the hand, and dragged down a mammoth $100,003.31 pot with an eight-three suited.

For this promotion, Poker Stars were paying everybody dealt into the hand a $10,000 bonus, and the winner hand of hand #10,000,000,000 got their bonus upgraded to a cool hundred large.

These awards were to be increased further based upon your rank within the VIP program.  Conspiracy theorists may note not only that it’s impossible to earn any frequent player points (and therefore progress through the VIP program) at the stakes played on the chosen table, but that it was also 6-handed table, not the usual 9-handed.  The cost to PokerStars was precisely $150,000 – not to be sniffed at, but on a full ring mid or high stakes game it could have cost almost double that.

The winner’s suited garbage made a flush on the turn to beat a five-four offsuit, a nine-ten suited and one other hand that was mucked and is not visible in the hand history.  Four players were all in before the flop.  Two folded pre-flop.

Those two players probably made the worse mistake in online poker, ever.

Players inwooke and XTedForrestX, sitting on stacks of $1.73 and $2.95 respectively, folded after the first player to act moved all in with his $4.83.  An astute move by Rechargeable, because with a hundred grand at stake you’re going to play, but you want to be racing off your cards against as few players as possible.  You’d think nobody will fold here ever, but at least you can give them a chance to get it wrong.

Here’s what getting it wrong fold cost them: for a saving of $2.95 (let’s take the worst case scenario) they gave up a one-sixth theoretical share of $90,000 additional money.  That’s an expected return of $15,000, not to mention the few dollars in the actual pot itself.  It’s over 30,500 to 1 pot odds, and and even with a hopeless hand you’re surely no worse off than a 20-1 shot to strike it rich.

Playing scared is one thing.  Winning ten grand for nothing but then not wanting to risk three bucks on the best lottery ticket you’ll ever get defies logic.

Nope, nothing really interesting happened.  Still, it’s less than ten weeks before I’ll be in Vegas.. bear with me during the dark weeks 🙂

7. Pocket pairs

I play 93.6% of pocket pairs, and raise them preflop 43.3%.  I do have negative lines for 77, 66, 44 and 22 though.  I don’t see any major problems, just a few big pots I lost with a set against a rivered flush, or a full house against quads, etc.  I do still think I might need to dump small pairs in early position because I often struggle to get a big enough payoff when it gets raised ahead of me and I do flop a set.

8. Suited connectors

Profitable to the tune of 9BB/100.  I cold called with a suited connector only 12 times, mostly KQs and QJs.  Overall I lost, but it’s a pretty small sample size.  The hands I played were almost all only for a tiny raise and in position.  Doesn’t feel like there’s much wrong here.

9. Unsuited connectors

Leak.  Only a small one, but I’m losing 1BB/100 with unsuited connectors.  This includes AKo, which I’m nearly $90 down on.  That’s because of some big pots I lost with top pair vs a set or two pair.  I’m getting more confident playing AK now, and feel like I lose less when I’m beaten, so I expect this figure to improve.  I’ve cold-called unsuited connectors 11 times and won once.  Seven times it was with JTo and the one pot I did win was very small.  Mental note made.

10. Postflop aggression

Wow, I c-bet a lot.  After a preflop raise, I bet or raise the flop 77.8% of the time.  Is that too high, if the guide I’m referring to says "at least 40%"?  Well I don’t think so, because filtering my hands on just these situations, I’ve made 122BB/100 when I continuation bet and when they lead out and I get to raise, the win rate soars to a phenominal 191BB/100.  I can live with that.

My overall postflop aggression factor is 2.83.  Plenty.  However this is mostly from my flop play: 4.12 on the flop, 1.83 on the turn and 1.90 on the river.  It’s not exactly passive on the later streets, but I wonder if this shows that I slow down a little too quickly and could be betting and raising a little more.

11. Check-raising

I’ve check-raised 111 times, 1.11% in total.  Every one of them, naturally, felt great.  I’m not doing it excessively, and overall the hands where I’ve check-raised show my biggest win rate: 449BB/100.  Of course this figure is pretty meaningless, because I’m usually only check-raising with my strongest hands and by its nature a check-raise builds nice big pots.  Still, it looks good just to finish with such an impressive figure!

What better way to chill out at night when working away from home than to analyze your Poker Tracker stats?  I’d even set up GoToMyPc especially so I could get at PT and drill down whenever I felt it necessary to get into the nitty gritty of my play.

Well I thought it would be a good idea, but I crashed out after a heavy night of partying.  And by partying, I actually mean lugging server hardware from one floor of a datacenter to another.

Here’s the first part anyway.  I based the analysis on this guide, and answered each point in turn.  I’ll do the same thing after another 25k hands.

1. Do I have sufficient preflop aggression?

Apparantly not.  On the button and two seats behind I’m raising about half the hands I play, but everywhere else it’s lower.  I already think I play too many weak hands out of position so eliminating them would improve this figure – not by raising more, but by calling less.

2. Am I positionally aware?

Indeed I am.  My VP$IP figure on the button is 26.21, whereas under the gun it’s 13.13.  So I’m very close indeed to playing twice as many hands in the best position as in the worst.

3. How’s my stealing?

My attempts to steal the blinds figure is 33.55%.  When filtering my hands only for steal attempts, my win rate is $59 per 100 hands.  Not too shabby, and much more than double my overall win rate – in fact more than ten times bigger!  I think there are other areas I can look to improve ahead of this.

4. Defending the blinds

This is good and bad.  The magic number, so they say, is  a loss of 0.375BB/100.  Anything worse than this and you may as well just check/fold every blind.  My number is is virtually the same figure, but positive: 0.37BB/100.  It’s reassuring.  I don’t make money from the blinds overall (nobody does) but when I decide to pay to play from these positions, it’s been profitbale.  But it could be more profitable.  I’m at -0.46BB/100 when facing a blind steal.  Defend less, then.

5. Heads-up play

This was a pleasant surprise: I’ve won 7BB/100 when heads up going to the flop.  I certainly didn’t expect this figure to any higher than my overall win rate.  Continuation bets apparently do rock.  However, when I filter only the hands where I didn’t raise, it’s a loss of 6BB/100.  I’m not profitable when limping with weak hands.  Most likely it’s small pocket pairs and suited aces when I’m out of position (given that I already know I raise a wide range in late position) and I suspected this.

6. Multiway pots

I’m winning 5BB/100 in multiway pots overall, and 3BB/100 when limping.  Guess there’s nothing wrong with that.

This is already long enough, so I’ve split the analysis into two parts.  Two blog entries for the price of one – bargain!  Some may say it’s a cheap trick to make readers come back for more, but given the content is really all for my benefit and not at all interesting to anyone else, that’s hardly the case.  I’m just getting bogged down in all those lovely figures.

You never know, something interesting may happen that I just have to write about in the meantime.  Doubtful though.

A month or so ago, I came across a security hole in an online poker network.

I’d thought about writing something about it after it had been fixed but time passed and I’d forgotten quite how major it was until I just mentioned it to someone who works for a network operator.  His reaction was similar to mine when it first came to light: holy shit.

Firstly I need to say that this has definitely been fixed now and it was, rightly, treated with some urgency by the developers.  However, even they didn’t know this was an issue.  Nor did any of the 40+ operators on the Microgaming network (formerly Prima Poker), which includes high profile UK names like Stan James, Ladbrokes and Bet365.

All of their players were at risk.

We can only hope that because so many different technical teams had failed to spot this, fraudsters hadn’t noticed it either.  After all, it’s such a fundamental security flaw, you probably wouldn’t even think to look.

OK that’s plenty of hype.  If you have the geek gene, this picture may frighten you immediately.  If not, read on and I’ll explain what it means:

This is the text view output from an HTTP traffic debugger.  It shows that player information was being sent over the network in the clear.  I’ve highlighted the key parts: if you read between the ampersands, you can see my username and password (obviously this isn’t my password, I just changed it for the screen grab) and my real money balance.

Yes, at the time I did have over $14,000 in my account.  I don’t any more.  It was never really mine, just a fallout from testing new deposit methods.  But I did sit down at a $1/$2 limit table with a five figure roll once. 🙂

From a crook’s point of view, being able to see the real money balance is a luxury that would not normally be afforded to them by using keyloggers or the less subtle approach of watching people as they key in their username and password.  They would not even need to attempt to access a stolen account to know whether there is enough money in there to make it worth their while trying to run off with it.

Although I ran this traffic sniffer on my own PC, software does exist to read such traffic over a network.  It’s the reason you have to look for the padlock in Internet Explorer when you’re entering credit card information.  Then you know the details are encrypted before they are sent in such a way that only the web server can understand them, and not anyone listening to the network along the way.

A point I failed to get across recently when I had to pay import duty when collecting from a Parcel Force depot and they took me into the back office to enter my credit card information in an insecure web page.  Seemingly, nobody had ever challenged this before.

There’s no padlock in a poker program, you just have to trust it.

The Microgaming client was in fact using SSL to send encrypted requests to the server.  However along the way, they were being redirected and ended up unencrypted in the process.  The redirector idea is great in theory, meaning that if an operator wants to change the location of a page or a script that’s used for their site, their players don’t need to download a whole new client for that simple change.

It’s the sheer number of requests that sent this information that was really worrying.  Simply logging in to the client was secure, no username or password was visible.  Accessing the banking pages was similarly secure.  Whew, you may think.

However, accessing "My Page" sent all this information in the clear.  This page typically shows players their loyalty point status, allows them to change their contact information and also allows access to banking anyway.  It could often be the button that players press to make a deposit or withdrawal instead of "Bank".

More worrying, as soon as you were logged in, a promotions page appeared in a popup.  This is just a web page designed to appear in a window inside the poker program.  So why would it even need to be passed information about the user?  Similarly, the promotions banner that is displayed in the lobby was being passed all this information.  There’s really no need.

These screenshots (click to enlarge) shows all the sensitive data being passed out and then back again.  At least on the way out (the bottom right pane shows an HTML form that submits these values to the actual location of the pages) it uses a secure connection.

The operator’s news page was accessed in a similar way.  There’s no need at all to send a password to this page – is the latest news really only available to registered players?  The responsible gaming information and support pages also received way more information than they needed.  No password here, but all the other information is present.  Someone must have made the decision to omit the password but to still transmit username and balance to these pages.  I just can’t think what the reasoning would be for that decision.

So that’s six different places that a user’s account information was being transmitted.  In case that’s not enough, there was one other instance that made sure anyone who was listening in for account information would not be disappointed.

In the program’s lobby – the screen where you search for which poker tables you want to play at – there is a scrolling message that is set by the operator.  Because this message is intended to be updated frequently – for instance, it might say "check out our money added tournament starting at 8pm" – it refreshes every three minutes.

As this process was also transmitting all the sensitive information in the clear, all a wannabe thief would have needed to do is set up a traffic sniffing program for a few minutes and wait to be furnished with the account details.  Minimum effort, maximum loot.

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The screenshots I’ve posted are from Gutshot Poker.  I need to stress that this operator was not at risk from this flaw – it was spotted and fixed before the player base was migrated from their previous operator.  This hole would have been catastrophic to Gutshot, who operate an internet cafe where every PC is used to play online poker.  A scammers paradise.

So I’ll say it again: this has now been fixed.  There’s no need to kneejerk and cashout from whatever site you play at.  Don’t bother the site’s support asking whether your money is safe.  It finally actually is.

But if you’ve ever played on a Microgaming site in the past you really should change your password right away.

Vij was staying with us at the weekend and I’d left him in front of the TV whilst I went upstairs to play some poker.  I’m a fantastic host, as you can tell, but he knows where the kettle is, and that’s all that really matters.

When he wandered in I had four tables running and almost straight away I fell into this hand.  Instinctively I began talking through my thought process, which made me look like a genius (naturally) and also made me wonder whether thinking through hands out loud was a good strategy.  If I have to justify every decision to someone else, I should make good decisions.

I made a pretty damn good laydown here, and for the right reasons, but I’m still not convinced by my flop play. It was a little bit on the random side.  Should I be thinning the field with a good but vulnerable hand in a multi-way pot, or should I wait for a safe card or to improve and then re-evaluate? I opted to call, not really knowing whether I was trapping or going fishing.

Still, I folded a set and I was right. 🙂

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, $0.50 BB (9 handed) Hand History Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: HTML)

CO ($41.75)
Button ($60)
SB ($23.55)
BB ($20)
Hero ($77.65)
UTG+1 ($25.40)
MP1 ($71.15)
MP2 ($44.35)
MP3 ($20.25)

Preflop: Hero is UTG with 9c, 9h.
Hero calls $0.50,

We’re talking about something else, and I limp in on autopilot.

“No, I’ve got poor position and I want to keep the pot small…”

UTG+1 raises to $1.5,

“… so I can still play if someone raises. Like that. :)”

There was an actual smilie at the end when I spoke

MP1 calls $1.50, 2 folds, CO calls $1.50,

“Any more callers? This will be easy then. If I don’t catch another 9 I’m done, but if I do I should be laughing.”

Vij nods. He didn’t actually nod. He’ll have said something, because that’s Vij’s way, but I wasn’t exactly listening. I was waiting to see if I would be able to show off by winning a nice big pot. In fact I don’t really remember what else he said at all. Hell, I’m struggling to remember what I said myself and just making up stuff to fill in the gaps.

1 fold, SB calls $1.25, 1 fold, Hero calls $1.

Flop: ($8) Tc, 9d, Js (5 players)

“Yes! Oh, wait. That’s sort of good”.

SB bets $0.5, Hero calls $0.50,

“Right, let’s see what happens.”

UTG+1 calls $0.50, MP1 raises to $4,

“Hmm. What’s he raising with?.”

CO calls $4,

“Oh. This one’s got something then.”

SB calls $3.50,

“So somebody could have the straight. I’m not scared of him, but he’s a worry. This guy probably has a draw, probably just a queen.”

“But I do have odds to draw against the straight, so I can call even if I’m behind”

Hero calls $3.50, UTG+1 folds.

“OK, pair it!”

Turn: ($24.50) 4s (4 players)

“That doesn’t help anyone, so let’s see who’s still interested.”

SB checks, Hero checks, MP1 bets $14,

“Right. I’m not afraid of him.”

CO raises to $36.25, SB folds,

“Now we have a decision, don’t we?”.

“He’s got two tens, two jacks or a straight.”

Hero folds, MP1 calls $22.25.

“God I hope I’m right.”

River: ($97) 2c (2 players)

Final Pot: $97
Main Pot: $97, between CO and MP1.

MP1 has Qh Jh (one pair, jacks).
CO has Ts Th (three of a kind, tens).
Outcome: CO wins $97.

My hands thrust themselves into the air.

And Vij is less impressed than he should be.

Just played another session as a shill for Gutshot’s Poker Night Live table tonight.  We all started with $25,000 available for reloading today and the action was fast and furious.  It’s difficult to imagine how Barry Martin and Nik Persaud will keep a straight face when they commentate on some of the hands that were, apparently, played at $25/$50 real money blinds!

Here’s my favourite today.  The powerhouse never loses…

** Dealing card to Super_Hero: 2 of Clubs, 5 of Diamonds
I_Tilt_Often folded
Super_Hero called – $50.00
kafkakelly folded
RaiseEmUp raised – $300.00
U_Dump_Chips went all-in – $2175.00
1Chipstacker folded
Super_Hero went all-in – $9347.00
RaiseEmUp folded
** Dealing the flop: 5 of Hearts, Jack of Hearts, 4 of Spades
** Dealing the turn: 10 of Diamonds
** Dealing the river: 9 of Clubs
U_Dump_Chips shows: 2 of Hearts, 2 of Diamonds
Super_Hero shows: 2 of Clubs, 5 of Diamonds
Super_Hero wins $4747.00 from the main pot

My first step towards this year’s WSOP was via a manic, almost free tournament on Gutshot Poker.  There was only one seat, and yay me!

75 players in and a bunch of rebuys.  It was free to enter but a whopping $0.50 if you ran out of chips.  Which I did.  About ten times.  At the 100/200 level I must have rebought for 500 and moved all-in on five straight hands.  For a $110 seat with less than 50 players remaining, I was always going to take a crack for another 50 cents however silly the structure was.  Finally I won a hand and I was back in the game.  Carried on playing like a lunatic right the way to the end and hit a whole bunch of two outers along the way.

Well, you have to get lucky to win, don’t you?

With three left I disconnected.  I was playing from my hotel connected using my phone.  Apparently it drains more battery than it can charge when you are online, although not all the time because I’ve actually been fine since then.  After an hour and a half of playing though, the phone was dead and I had to wait for it to have enough juice to restart the phone, hop quickly back online and move all in repeatedly and hope for the best.

The best happened. I clearly rock at all cheap all-in pushfests.

The tournament I’m in is a 9-seat guaranteed satellite on 19th June, and it’s televised on Poker Night Live.  Most of the seats are actually for a $1000 WSOP super satellite but with flights and accomodation included, so with the cheaper packages the odds are much better.  There’s all kinds of free and cheap ways to get into this satellite including a completely free quiz on the PNL TV show.  To be honest, I’d probably pay $110 to play this one anyway.  There’s still a very good chance of a decent overlay on those seats!

This is the yummiest hand I’ve been involved in for a long time. It might be a little premature but I think I’ll name it my Hand of the Month. An occasional feature.

It could only be better if the guy married to his suited connectors had a bigger stack that he wanted to throw away. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say his first raise was “creative” and his first call was “speculative”. The all in call is still suicidal, whatever way you look at it.

Why is this hand so beautiful though? It’s not just the all in call from a hand that was clearly way behind. My re-raise to $7 was perfectly sized in order to allow the short stack to come back over the top with just enough to re-open the action. I could then push and either play for stacks against the third player (it did seem like he liked his hand) or just take my aces against the short stack with some very healthy dead money.

I raised $5, he moved in for another $5.40. Just enough to make a full raise.

It’s so good, I’m going to pretend that it was intentional… 😉

—

PokerStars No-Limit Hold’em, $0.50 BB (8 handed) Hand History Converter Tool from FlopTurnRiver.com (Format: HTML)
UTG+1 ($64.55)
MP1 ($29.75)
MP2 ($12.40)
CO ($14.25)
Button ($48.25)
Hero ($70.90)
BB ($51.95)
UTG ($34.25)

Preflop: Hero is SB with Ah, Ac.
UTG raises to $2, 2 folds, MP2 calls $2, 2 folds, Hero raises to $7, 1 fold, UTG calls $5, MP2 raises to $12.4, Hero raises to $70.9, UTG calls $27.25 (All-In).

Flop: ($118.05) 7s, Qs, 2d
Turn: ($118.05) Qh
River: ($118.05) Kd

Hero has Ah Ac (two pair, aces and queens).
UTG has 6c 7c (two pair, queens and sevens).
MP2 has Th Td (two pair, queens and tens).
Outcome: Hero wins $118.05.

Here’s one hand from my Poker Night Live session.  Don’t wait for TV for this one, it’s much more exciting if you don’t see both sets of hole cards.  It’s the POWERHOUSE!

Click here to view movie