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So did I learn anything from the $215 limit tournament that, truthfully, I should have never played? Yes I did, but it definitely wasn’t worth the money. I’m sure I could have learned exactly the same thing from a $30 or $50 tournament.
One thing I’d forgotten is that fixed limit poker plays out much slower than no limit, and how significant that could be in a tournament. Because many more hands go to a showdown, you get to see play hands per level. Even starting with 2500 chips (62.5 big bets at 20/40), it didn’t seem long before everyone was short stacked. After an hour, 29 players (of 36 in total) still remained but with the next level being 150/300 and the average stack at just over 3100 chips, most players are already just two pots away from busto.
Players don’t go broke in the early stages, and even the very worst – or the very unluckiest – bleed away slowly, so unless you can accumulate a lot of chips (usually by runing very hot) you end up like the rest of the field: waiting to see a big hand and hoping it holds. Therefore I suspect that, during the first few levels, looking for opportunities to play hands with big pot potential like suited connectors and small pocket pairs cheaply is much more valuable than trying to milk a tiny edge from your very strong hands pre-flop. One extra bet won in level 1 is only worth half a bet as soon as the clock chimes in level 2.
The main point of strategy I’d overlooked though was blind play. Whether it was trying to defend against suspected stealers or finding opportunities to steal myself, I never really got it right. With more severe blinds stealing becomes more attractive and defending with marginal hands – particularly out of position to a button raise – becomes a very volatile strategy.
With a short stack, blind play requires great care indeed. There is no such thing as a resteal move – the best you can do is offer the raiser 5-1 pot odds to see a flop – and you cannot open-push in order to put maximum pressure on the blinds. If you decide to raise, you have to be prepared to play a flop.
The biggest mistake you can make in limit hold’em is to fold the best hand for a single bet. However in a tournament, making thin value calls can be devastating when that single bet represents a large proportion of your stack, or even your last few chips. Now that I am a little more prepared to think ahead, hopefully I will be able to avoid going too far in situations where a crippling river call would be mandatory.
I made many notes to try to convince myself I was getting something of value of the tournament. I forced myself just to pick just one hand to write about. I began with 1130 in chips – just over 5 big bets at the 100/200 level:
Preflop: Hero is SB with A , Q . Hero posts a blind of 50.
6 folds, Button raises, Hero 3-bets, 1 fold, Button caps, Hero calls.
Flop: A , 6, 5 (2 players)
Hero checks, Button bets, Hero calls.
Turn: 9 (2 players)
Hero checks, Button bets, Hero calls.
River: 2 (2 players)
Hero checks, Button checks.
I found myself insta-raising with AQ from the small blind when facing a button raise. As you do. However, I’m pretty sure this was a mistake when the reraise already committed about 30% of my chips to the pot, and possibly more if it was capped. Although a smooth call encourages the big blind to come along for the ride, in this situation I think it’s a risk you have to take.
I should have chosen to control the pot size, rather than to force out the third player in the hand. I figure that my hand is probably the best and I definitely want to see a flop, but I’m not going to check-call off almost all of my stack one bet at a time with just ace high. Leading out when I miss the flop is going to be the only chance to bluff at this pot, and the smaller the pot, the more significant my flop bet will be.
So with the pot as big as it could possibly be, I immediately decided to just check-call with the top pair in an attempt to lose as little as possible. His pre-flop cap showed strength, or so I thought, so AK was a very likely holding. I couldn’t lay the hand down, but I did not expect to be winning. This thinking is dreadful.
Had I thought ahead like I was meant to, I would have realised that one more small bet and two big bets would have left me with just 230 chips – barely one big bet, and almost no chance of recovery in the tournament. The decision to go all the way if I hit the flop should have been made pre-flop. Then, when I do hit, the objective is to get as many chips into the pot as possible.
That means I have to try to get in a check-raise for a big bet. So I should check-call the flop and then let him bet again on the turn – as I did, but for the wrong reason, and without firing the check-raise with a hand that was committed to this pot. If there’s no turn bet it means I’ve got it all sewn up so then I can lead the river (but probably don’t win any more money).
Trying to trap here, even without being at all certain that my hand is best, gives him the opportunity to lose money with worse hands than mine, and I don’t scare off unimproved pocket pairs by admitting that I liked the ace on the flop. It gives me the best chance to get all my money in the pot, which is what I clearly have to do if I make a hand that I’m prepared to take to showdown.
He showed JJ, and I survived – for a little longer at least.
Here endeth the $215 lesson.
Well I’d been hoping to drop on a non-stupid fixed limit tournament all week, and it just happened. Right there staring at me in the Poker Stars lobby the minute I signed in… way beyond my bankroll but how could I possibly say no after all this time?
$215 Weekly Fixed Limit Hold’em – Late Reg.
Baptism of fire coming right up then. It’s 10/20 blinds in level one with 2500 starting chips, and I got a walk on my first big blind. Definitely playing a little tighter than I’ve seen before.
EDIT: Nitted my way to 14th place. Wasn’t as useful as it should have been for $215 but at least I did pick up some things to consider. Probably post some hands tomorrow.
Sometimes I see things in my web stats that disturb me just a little. Such as discovering that not only did I appear on the first page of Google results for the very specific search phrase "motel room swallowings of dicks", but that three people actually clicked on that link to view my blog.
I have to assume that they were disappointed.
In just three weeks time I’ll be playing the first of four tournaments I plan to enter in the Orleans Open. Three no-limit Hold’em poker tournaments, and one fixed limit folly. My backers may be wondering what I’ve been doing in order to prepare for the fixed limit event.
Fixed limit tournaments are quite rare – The Orleans has two $40 limit tournaments in their normal weekly schedule, but they’re the only ones in town that I know of. I’ve never played one live before. I’ve played a few online, but mostly by accident on Party Poker, where they still insist on labelling fixed limit as simply "Hold’em" and you’re meant to remember that the default format for a poker tournament is fixed limit. The infinitely more popular no-limit tournaments are labelled "NL Hold’em" and pot limit is marked "PL Hold’em", so I guess the distinction is there. But given that even the times I’ve intended to enter a limit tournament, I’ve ended up at a table with at least half the players not wanting to be there, they might consider making a simple change for the benefit of many of their players. Oh, never mind, I just remembered who we’re talking about…
From what I remember, the first few hands always go like this:
Raise raise cap call call call call call.
Bet raise raise cap call call call call call.
Bet raise raise cap call call call call call.
Bet raise raise cap call call call call call.
The sound of half a dozen players trying to bust out so they can start again in a different tournament that they actually want to play. But even after all that action, the losers still have 80% of their starting stack left. And so the pattern begins again.
You never know, it might be just the same as this in a $540 festival tournament, but I doubt it.
I’ve not really found anything lately, but I’m still on the lookout for some limit tournaments I could try online. I want to find a tournament with a decent sized field (I remember playing in a field of just seven on Empire a while back) and one where the players do actually want to be there, so I can get a feel for how the dynamics of the game change as the limits increase.
In case I don’t find anything suitable in time though, I can always keep in mind the strategy employed by the youngest ever World Series of Poker bracelet winner, Steve Billirakis. He won Event #1, $5000 World Championship Mixed Hold’em event – which alternated between no-limit and fixed limit every 30 minutes – aged 21 years and 10 days.
In this interview with Phil Gordon from the Expert Insight WSOP Podcast, Billirakis revealed (obviously I’m paraphrasing) that he is an arrogant rich kid who was desparate to get onto TV playing poker as soon as possible after his 21st birthday, without having – or thinking he might need to have – any idea how to actually play a game that made up 50% of this tournament. Sadly, he got very lucky.
LOL dickaments.
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"I don’t have much experience playing limit Hold’em, so I pretty much avoided playing limit Hold’em"
Oh, if you still want a piece of my action, I only have 5% left for sale, and it’s going on eBay very shortly if I don’t shift it!
With the twins in Big Brother putting Stoke-on-Trent on the map in their very own, very pink way, Charley and Laura had this to say about their hometown:
I finally figured out how to do this YouTube thing all the cool kids are doing, and I made the clip especially short so there’s a chance somebody will actually watch it. But still, even though it’s only a 25 second clip, I know you probably didn’t brother pressing play. So here’s what you need to know.
Charley: Where they born, Stoke-on-Trent?
Laura: Yeah.
Charley: Maybe they’re a bit behind time.
Laura: Could be.
Charley: By about ten years?
Laura: Yeah, ten I’d say. Yeah.
Last weekend I was fortunate enough to be shopping in Hanley and noticed that there was a new Costa Coffee at the entrance to the Potteries Shopping Centre. Pretty unremarkable you might think if you come from anywhere that lives in the twenty first century. But this is actually Stoke’s first franchise coffee house.
OK, there was a tiny Costa inside a branch of a building society for a while, but it didn’t last long, and that doesn’t really count. This is the first genuine, stand-alone chain coffee joint in town.
Not only that, but I saw a Millies Cookies that wasn’t there before and some kind of new chain juice bar I could care less about (cookies, on the other hand…) – they must have popped up about the same time. It’s almost as if Hanley suddenly became a modern town overnight.
Still, Stoke must still be the only place in the universe that doesn’t have a Starbucks. It must have been passed over so many times already, when other nearby cities of similar sizes have multiple franchies. Nottingham, for example, has three Starbucks and Derby has two. With over 500 stores in the UK, and a new stores opening every two weeks in London alone, you would think that England’s 12th largest city might get a look in.
So I had to check just when the almost-nationwide infestation of such places began. Starbucks first set up shop in the UK in May 1998 – just over 9 years ago.
Charley, you were so close.
Not everyone loves Las Vegas, so in the interest of providing balanced – although in this case clearly wrong – opinion, here is another rant (here’s the first one) from BBC movie reviewer Mark Kermode.
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".. Las Vegas is not a place to go and have a good time, Las Vegas is a cesspit on the face of the Earth and it shouldn’t be there.."
Ocean’s Thirteen should remains in the box office charts for a few more weeks, so I’m sure we’ll have more of these to look forward to…
The last resort of a blogger with not much to say right now? Pictures of his own feet.
Well actually I did already say I’d put up a picture of my socks to balance the nastiness of the last entry, but there’ll be plenty more sock shots to come in the next couple of weeks as I riffle through my inventory of casino branded hosiery and work out which ones are past their prime and need to be replaced.
This pair from Caesars has clearly been in better shape.
If you have never tried to take a photograph of your own foot, I suggest you try it. Quite a challenge, as you can see from the poor quality of this picture. You have to combine holding the camera steady, composing the shot with the foot at the right angle, removing foreign objects from view, getting good enough lighting and not falling over. For someone of my limited coordination, it’s quite impressive that managing to keep my balance was just about the only factor I succeeded at this time.
I will be practising. But although it’s something of an ambition to grab the top ranked search result on Google for "casino socks", I can’t promise to personally model every sock I decide to feature here. Sorry about that.
If you have no interest in things so geeky as DIY database queries and obscure poker statistics, look away now. Next time I’ll probably post a picture of one of my socks or something to bring a little balance back into the world.
So then, how many times have I flopped a set, and how much did I win? From just over 50,000 hands in my database now, we’d expect to see about 3000 pocket pairs dealt (1 in every 17 hands). The odds of flopping a set are are 7.5-1, so somewhere in the region of 350 flopped sets would be about right. I had no idea what to expect as a win rate for these hands alone.
If you could care less about SQL, just skip past the code section, otherwise here’s what I did. I failed to find any more elegant way of checking for a flopped set than simply comparing the card rank of one of the hole cards with each card on the flop in turn. This query will actually count flopped quads as well as flopped sets, if I have any.
select count(*) as freq,
sum(gp.total_won) – sum(gp.total_bet) as won
from game_players gp, game g
where gp.player_id = 11
and gp.game_id = g.game_id
and gp.pair_hand = 1
and substring(gp.hole_card_1 from 1 for 1) in (
substring(g.flop_1 from 1 for 1),
substring(g.flop_2 from 1 for 1),
substring(g.flop_3 from 1 for 1))
Let the results speak. I’ve seen 317 flopped sets (close enough to what I was expecting) and overall made $2884.50 profit from those hands. That’s just about $9.10 – 9 big bets at 50NL – each time. Look at it another way: just over every five flopped sets, I’m winning a full $50 stack from another player. That sounds OK.
Look at it yet another way: compare to pocket aces. Poker Tracker tells me that I’ve been dealt AA 253 times and that I won an average of 4.86 big bets each time. Three hundred of anything is no huge sample size, but it’s a start in the right direction. We could say that flopped sets are, roughly, twice as profitable as pocket aces. That’s definitely nothing to complain about.
The difference, of course, is that pocket aces always start off as the best hand – and by a long way too. What’s been killing me lately is the abundance of set-over-set action, with me on the wrong end of it. I’m sure I’m remembering things worse than they actually were, so what I want to find out is both how and when I’ve been getting beat.
Adding the condition
and gp.total_won < gp.total_bet
to the end of the query will find only those hands where I flopped a set and did not win. This includes split-pot situations, as the rake taken from the pot will make the amount returned less than the amount I put in the pot. I used this condition to find only losses (no splits), although it assumes there are two players at showdown. Not strictly true, but close enough, and do it any more accurately would create a monster query.
and gp.total_won < gp.total_bet – (g.rake / 2)
The results: 32 losses, 8 splits. 87% of my flopped sets won at showdown (compare: I won with 89% of my pocket aces). I can live with that – there’s still two cards to come, after all. The combined loss on those 32 hands was $984.15, or $30.75 per hand. A big chunk for sure, but almost certainly I was ahead when my money went in. If only there was an easy way to check that…
The best I’ve come up with is to find all my set-over-set confrontations. To do this I have to find the times both I and my opponent have a pair that matches one of the flop cards. The query looks a little something like this.
select me.hole_cards, opp.hole_cards,
me.total_won – me.total_bet as won
from game_players me, game_players opp, game g
where me.player_id = 11
and me.game_id = g.game_id
and me.pair_hand = 1
and substring(me.hole_card_1 from 1 for 1) in (
substring(g.flop_1 from 1 for 1),
substring(g.flop_2 from 1 for 1),
substring(g.flop_3 from 1 for 1))
and opp.player_id != me.player_id
and opp.game_id = g.game_id
and opp.pair_hand = 1
and substring(opp.hole_card_1 from 1 for 1) in (
substring(g.flop_1 from 1 for 1),
substring(g.flop_2 from 1 for 1),
substring(g.flop_3 from 1 for 1))
It’s ugly for sure, and still a little flawed too. I can’t even start to get my head around how this might cope with three players all flopping sets at the same time. This query just dumps out a list of every time I was in a pot with a flopped set against another flopped set, rather than counting wins and losses – or times I flopped the bigger set or smaller set. It’s only a small sample size – 15 confrontations – but it proves a point.
Won 3, lost 12. Overall, I’m down $386 from those hands. A loss of $32.17 each time I got shafted is understandable, but I’m down an average of $25.70 – nearly 26 BB/hand – across all set over set scenarios, simply because I never seem to be on the right end of them. I would expect that these are usually breakeven situations over the long term: the times you’re ahead you expect to get paid off, and the times you’re behind you’re almost certainly going to get stacked.
Boy I am owed. And if I talked to you about how poker’s been going for me lately and spouted some far fetched story about how bad I’m running… just look. Told you so!
The royal flush was an anomaly.
When you run bad you start doubting things. You start to ask yourself things like whether flopping a set really is that good at all. Because yesterday, I flopped four sets, and every one of them lost, and every one of them cost me my entire stack.
OK, as you insist, I’ll indulge you with a bad beat story.
I have pocket fives on a king-five-deuce flop, all different suits. It all looks so gorgeous. The pre-flop raiser fires on the flop, I call and the other player – who it turns out couldn’t get away from pocket queens – also calls. Magic. The turn brings a second king and he leads out again, but for a much smaller bet this time. Does he hate the king, or does he have AK and feel like he just got invincible? Well, I can’t put him on K5 or K2 and I don’t expect he’d have played KK so strong on the flop. Right now is where I’m going to make him pay, so I move all in. Pocket queens feels like he’s pot committed and comes along for the ride…
"I have AA", he types in the chat box. I don’t know why, because almost half a second later he’s called anyway. Considering I was hoping that he would have ace-king, I’m especially pleased. Just four cards left in the deck – the two remaining aces and two kings – can improve his hand to beat me now, whereas AK would have had 3 aces, 1 king and 3 deuces for the win.
But when you run bad, you don’t just get beat, you get beat in the cruelest possible ways. A third king on the river gives us both kings full, his aces both playing but my hand being reduced to what may as well have been a five and a joker.
On days like this you start to wonder whether it’s just a matter of karma. If you somehow did wrong by someone, but it surely couldn’t be that when I hadn’t left the house all day, and the only phone call I answered was from the bank, telling me that a cheque I dropped through the letterbox at the weekend wasn’t signed. I now know I must try harder to check these things to make the nice lady’s job so much easier. She ended the call by asking, with a sigh, whether I wanted her to send it back to me. Clearly, some of their customers are indifferent about money.
And so, finally, to the business of reassuring myself that flopped sets are actually good hands. Of course I know this really, but it’s a great excuse to conjure up some stats that Poker Tracker can’t provide by itself. So I’ve started to construct a few queries that can be run against a PostgreSQL Poker Tracker database to analyse set performance.
You lucky lucky people have a stat-packed post, full of SQL code and probably just proving something we alreayd know, to look forward to – hopefully tomorrow.
Royal flush, baby!
It’s been a while. Definitely over a year as I’ve not had a picture to post since I started the blog. I so definitely would, as you can now see…!
Possibly the only thing more awesome than the royal itself is to have hit it backdoor style.
I hope you enjoy the picture as much as I did. Click on it if you would like to join me in basking in its full size glory. 🙂
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